Part 11 (1/2)
”'Thank you, I will not trouble you,' said Ferdinand. 'Get me that note changed.'
”'Yes, sir,' replied the little waiter, bowing very low, as he disappeared.
”'Gentleman in best drawing-room wants breakfast. Gentleman in best drawing-room wants change for a ten-pound note. Breakfast immediately for gentleman in best drawing-room. Tea, coffee, toast, ham, tongue, and a devil. A regular n.o.b!'”
[Ill.u.s.tration: CLIFFORD'S INN (_see page 92_).]
Sloman's has been sketched both by Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Thackeray. In ”Vanity Fair” we find it described as the temporary abode of the impecunious Colonel Crawley, and Moss describes his uncomfortable past and present guests in a manner worthy of Fielding himself. There is the ”Honourable Capting Famish, of the Fiftieth Dragoons, whose 'mar' had just taken him out after a fortnight, jest to punish him, who punished the champagne, and had a party every night of regular tip-top swells down from the clubs at the West End; and Capting Ragg and the Honourable Deuceace, who lived, when at home, in the Temple. There's a doctor of divinity upstairs, and five gents in the coffee-room who know a good gla.s.s of wine when they see it. There is a tably d'hote at half-past five in the front parlour, and cards and music afterwards.”
Moss's house of durance the great novelist describes as splendid with dirty huge old gilt cornices, dingy yellow satin hangings, while the barred-up windows contrasted with ”vast and oddly-gilt picture-frames surrounding pieces sporting and sacred, all of which works were by the greatest masters, and fetched the greatest prices, too, in the bill transactions, in the course of which they were sold and bought over and over again. A quick-eyed Jew boy locks and unlocks the door for visitors, and a dark-eyed maid in curling-papers brings in the tea.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: EXECUTION OF TOMKINS AND CHALLONER (_see page 95_).]
The Law Inst.i.tute, that Grecian temple that has wedged itself into the south-west end of Chancery Lane, was built in the stormy year of 1830.
On the Lord Mayor's day that year there was a riot; the Reform Bill was still pending, and it was feared might not pa.s.s, for the Lords were foaming at the mouth. The Iron Duke was detested as an opposer of all change, good or bad; the new police were distasteful to the people; above all, there was no Lord Mayor's show, and no man in bra.s.s armour to look at. The rioters a.s.sembled outside No. 62, Fleet Street, were there harangued by some dirty-faced demagogue, and then marched westward. At Temple Bar the zealous new ”Peelers” slammed the old muddy gates, to stop the threatening mob; but the City Marshal, red in the face at this breach of City privilege, re-opened them, and the mob roared approval from a thousand distorted mouths. The more pugnacious reformers now broke the scaffolding at the Law Inst.i.tute into dangerous cudgels, and some 300 of the unwashed patriots dashed through the Bar towards Somerset House, full of vague notions of riot, and perhaps (delicious thought!) plunder. But at St. Mary's, Commissioner Mayne and his men in the blue tail-coats received the roughs in battle array, and at the first charge the coward mob broke and fled.
In 1815, No. 68, Chancery Lane, not far from the north-east corner, was the scene of an event which terminated in the legal murder of a young and innocent girl. It was here, at Olibar Turner's, a law stationer's, that Eliza Fenning lived, whom we have already mentioned when we entered Hone's shop, in Fleet Street. This poor girl, on the eve of a happy marriage, was hanged at Newgate, on the 26th of July, 1815, for attempting to poison her master and mistress. The trial took place at the Old Bailey on April 11th of the same year, and Mr. Gurney conducted the prosecution before that rough, violent, unfeeling man, Sir John Sylvester (_alias_ Black Jack), Recorder of London, who, it is said, used to call the calendar ”a bill of fare.” The a.r.s.enic for rats, kept in a drawer by Mr. Turner, had been mixed with the dough of some yeast dumplings, of which all the family, including the poor servant, freely partook. There was no evidence of malice, no suspicion of any ill-will, except that Mrs. Turner had once scolded the girl for being free with one of the clerks. It was, moreover, remembered that the girl had particularly pressed her mistress to let her make some yeast dumplings on the day in question. The defence was shamefully conducted. No one pressed the fact of the girl having left the dough in the kitchen for some time untended; nor was weight laid on the fact of Eliza Fenning's own danger and sufferings. All the poor, half-paralysed, Irish girl could say was, ”I am truly innocent of the whole charge--indeed I am. I liked my place. I was very comfortable.” And there was pathos in those simple, stammering words, more than in half the self-conscious diffuseness of tragic poetry. In her white bridal dress (the cap she had joyfully worked for herself) she went to her cruel death, still repeating the words, ”I am innocent.” The funeral, at St. George the Martyr, was attended by 10,000 people. Curran used to declaim eloquently on her unhappy fate, and Mr. Charles Phillips wrote a glowing rhapsody on this victim of legal dulness. But such mistakes not even Justice herself can correct. A city mourned over her early grave; but the life was taken, and there was no redress. Gadsden, the clerk, whom she had warned not to eat any dumpling, as it was heavy (this was thought suspicious), afterwards became a wealthy solicitor in Bedford Row.
CHAPTER VIII.
FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--_continued_).
Clifford's Inn--Dyer's Chambers--The Settlement after the Great Fire--Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wives--Fetter Lane--Waller's Plot and its Victims--Praise-G.o.d Barebone and his Doings--Charles Lamb at School--Hobbes the Philosopher--A Strange Marriage--Mrs.
Brownrigge--Paul Whitehead--The Moravians--The Record Office and its Treasures--Rival Poets.
Clifford's Inn, originally a town house of the Lords Clifford, ancestors of the Earls of c.u.mberland, given to them by Edward II., was first let to the students of law in the eighteenth year of King Edward III., at a time when might was too often right, and hard knocks decided legal questions oftener than deed or statute. Harrison the regicide was in youth clerk to an attorney in Clifford's Inn, but when the Civil War broke out he rode off and joined the Puritan troopers.
Clifford's Inn is the oldest Inn in Chancery. There was formerly, we learn from Mr. Jay, an office there, out of which were issued writs, called ”Bills of Middles.e.x,” the appointment of which office was in the gift of the senior judge of the Queen's Bench. ”But what made this Inn once noted was that all the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court (better known as the Palace Court) had their chambers there, as also had the satellites, who paid so much per year for using their names and looking at the nature of their practice. I should say that more misery emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous counties in England. The causes in this court were obliged to be tried in the city of Westminster, near the Palace, and it was a melancholy sight (except to lawyers) to observe in the court the crowd of every description of persons suing one another. The most remarkable man in the court was the extremely fat prothonotary, Mr. Hewlett, who sat under the judge or the judge's deputy, with a wig on his head like a thrush's nest, and with only one book before him, which was one of the volumes of 'Burns' Justice.' I knew a respectable gentleman (Mr. G. Dyer) who resided here in chambers (where he died) over a firm of Marshalsea attorneys. This gentleman, who wrote a history of Cambridge University and a biography of Robinson of Cambridge, had been a Bluecoat boy, went as a Grecian to Cambridge, and, after the University, visited almost every celebrated library in Europe. It often struck me what a mighty difference there was between what was going on in the one set of chambers and the other underneath. At Mr. Dyer's I have seen Sir Walter Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, Talfourd, and many other celebrated literati, 'all benefiting by hearing, which was but of little advantage to the owner.' In the lawyers' chambers below were people wrangling, swearing, and shouting, and some, too, even fighting, the only relief to which was the eternal stamping of cognovits, bound in a book as large as a family Bible.” The Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord Chelmsford both at one time practised in the County Court, purchased their situations for large sums, and afterwards sold them. ”It was not a bad nursery for a young barrister, as he had an opportunity of addressing a jury. There were only four counsel who had a right to practise in this court, and if you took a first-rate advocate in there specially, you were obliged to give briefs to two of the privileged four. On the tombstone of one of the compensated Marshalsea attorneys is cut the bitterly ironical epitaph, ”Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of G.o.d.””
c.o.ke, that great luminary of English jurisprudence, resided at Clifford's Inn for a year, and then entered himself at the Inner Temple.
c.o.ke, it will be remembered, conducted the prosecution of both Ess.e.x and Raleigh; in both cases he was grossly unfeeling to fallen great men.
The George Dyer mentioned by Mr. Jay was not the author of ”The Fleece,”
but that eccentric and amiable old scholar sketched by Charles Lamb in ”The Essays of Elia.” Dyer was a poet and an antiquary, and edited nearly all the 140 volumes of the Delphin Cla.s.sics for Valpy.
Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually settled down in the monastic solitude of Clifford's Inn to compose verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour in Colebrooke Row into the New River, and was then fished out and restored with brandy-and-water, Lamb was never tired of telling. At the latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died in 1841.
The hall of Clifford's Inn is memorable as being the place where Sir Matthew Hale and seventeen other wise and patient judges sat, after the Great Fire of 1666, to adjudicate upon the claims of the landlords and tenants of burned houses, and prevent future lawsuits. The difficulty of discovering the old boundaries, under the mountains of ashes, must have been great; and forty thick folio volumes of decisions, now preserved in the British Museum, tell of many a legal headache in Clifford's Inn.
A very singular custom, and probably of great antiquity, prevails after the dinners at Clifford's Inn. The society is divided into two sections--the Princ.i.p.al and Aules, and the Junior or ”Kentish Men.” When the meal is over, the chairman of the Kentish Men, standing up at the Junior table, bows gravely to the Princ.i.p.al, takes from the hand of a servitor standing by four small rolls of bread, silently dashes them three times on the table, and then pushes them down to the further end of the board, from whence they are removed. Perfect silence is preserved during this mystic ceremony, which some antiquary who sees deeper into millstones than his brethren thinks typifies offerings to Ceres, who first taught mankind the use of laws and originated those peculiar ornaments of civilisation, their expounders, the lawyers.
In the hall is preserved an old oak folding case, containing the forty-seven rules of the inst.i.tution, now almost defaced, and probably of the reign of Henry VIII. The hall cas.e.m.e.nt contains armorial gla.s.s with the bearings of Baptist Hicks, Viscount Camden, &c.
Robert Pultock, the almost unknown author of that graceful story, ”Peter Wilkins,” from whose flying women Southey drew his poetical notion of the Glendoveer, or flying spirit, in his wild poem of ”The Curse of Kehama,” lived in this Inn, paced on its terrace, and mused in its garden. ”'Peter Wilkins' is to my mind,” says Coleridge (in his ”Table Talk”), ”a work of uncommon beauty, and yet Stothard's ill.u.s.trations have _added_ beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that 'Robinson Crusoe'
and 'Peter Wilkins' could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of 'Peter Wilkins,' but there are many beautiful things in it, especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside, she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers, to be like him! It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, _ejusdem generis_, to 'Peter Wilkins' and 'Robinson Crusoe.' I once projected such a thing, but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouque might effect something; but I should fear that neither he nor any other German could entirely understand what may be called the '_desert island_' feeling. I would try the marvellous line of 'Peter Wilkins,' if I attempted it, rather than the _real_ fiction of 'Robinson Crusoe.'”
The name of the author of ”Peter Wilkins” was discovered only a few years ago. In the year 1835 Mr. Nicol, the printer, sold by auction a number of books and ma.n.u.scripts in his possession, which had formerly belonged to the well-known publisher, Dodsley; and in arranging them for sale, the original agreement for the sale of the ma.n.u.script of ”Peter Wilkins,” by the author, ”Robert Pultock, of Clifford's Inn,” to Dodsley, was discovered. From this doc.u.ment it appears that Mr. Pultock received twenty pounds, twelve copies of the work, and ”the cuts of the first impression”--_i.e._, a set of proof impressions of the fanciful engravings that professed to ill.u.s.trate the first edition of the work--as the price of the entire copyright. This curious doc.u.ment had been sold afterwards to John Wilkes, Esq., M.P.
Inns of Chancery, like Clifford's Inn, were originally law schools, to prepare students for the larger Inns of Court.