Part 6 (1/2)
A witness under severe cross-examination by Serjeant Dunning was repeatedly asked if he did not live close to the Court. On admitting that he did, the further question was put, ”And pray, sir, for what reason did you take up your residence in that place?”--”To avoid the rascally impertinence of dunning,” came the ready answer.
A barrister's name once gave a witness the opportunity to score in the course of a severe cross-examination. Missing was the leader of his Circuit and was defending his client charged with stealing a donkey. The prosecutor had left the donkey tied up to a gate, and when he returned it was gone. ”Do you mean to say,” said counsel, ”the donkey was stolen from the gate?”--”I mean to say, sir,” said the witness, giving the judge and then the jury a sly look, at the same time pointing to the counsel, ”the a.s.s was missing.”
Mr. Clarke, a leader of the Midland Circuit, was a very worthy lawyer of the old school. A client long refusing to agree to refer to arbitration a cause which judge, jury, and counsel wished to get rid of, he at last said to him, ”You d--d infernal fool, if you do not immediately follow his lords.h.i.+p's recommendation, I shall be obliged to use strong language to you.” Once, in a council of the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn, the same gentleman very conscientiously opposed their calling a Jew to the Bar.
Some tried to point out the hards.h.i.+p to be imposed upon the young gentleman, who had been allowed to keep his terms, and whose prospects in life would thus be suddenly blasted. ”Hards.h.i.+p!” said the zealous churchman, ”no hards.h.i.+p at all! Let him become a Christian, and be d--d to him!”
It is sometimes imagined by laymen that verdicts may be obtained by the trickery of counsel. Doubtless counsel may try to throw dust in the eyes of jurors, but they are not very successful. Lord Campbell tells a story of Clarke, who by such tactics brought a case to a satisfactory compromise. The attorney, coming to him privately, said, ”Sir, don't you think we have got very good terms? But you rather went beyond my instructions.”--”You fool!” retorted Clarke; ”how do you suppose you could have got such terms if I had stuck to your instructions.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN ADOLPHUS, BARRISTER.]
In the biography of John Adolphus, a famous criminal lawyer, we are told that the judges of his time were much impressed with the following table of degrees. ”The three degrees of comparison in a lawyer's progress are: getting on; getting on-er (honour); getting on-est (honest).” He declared the judges acknowledged much truth in the degrees. The third degree in Mr. Adolphus' table reminds us of the story of the farmer who was met by the head of a firm of solicitors, who inquired the name of a plant the farmer was carrying. ”It's a plant,” replied the latter, ”that will not grow in a lawyer's garden; it is called honesty.”
One night, walking through St. Giles's by way of a short cut towards home, an Irish woman came up to Mr. Adolphus. ”Why, Misther Adolphus!
and who'd a' thought of seeing you in the Holy Ground?”--”And how came you to know who I am?” said Adolphus. ”Lord bless and save ye, sir!
not know ye? Why, I'd know ye if ye was boiled up in a soup!”
Mr. Montagu Chambers was counsel for a widow who had been put in a lunatic asylum, and sued the two medical men who signed the certificate of her insanity. The plaintiff's case was to prove that she was not addicted to drinking, and that there was no pretence for treating hers as a case of _delirium tremens_. Dr. Tunstal, the last of plaintiff's witnesses, described one case in which he had cured a patient of _delirium tremens_ in a _single night_, and he added, ”It was a case of gradual drinking, _sipping all day_ from morning till night.” These words were scarcely uttered when Mr. Chambers rose in triumph, and said, ”My lord, that is _my case_.”
On the Northern Circuit a century ago, there was a famous barrister who was familiarly known among his brother advocates as Jack Lee. He was engaged in examining one Mary Pritchard, of Barnsley, and began his examination with, ”Well, Mary, if I may credit what I hear, I may venture to address you by the name of Black Moll.”--”Faith you may, mister lawyer, for I am always called so by the blackguards.” On another occasion he was retained for the plaintiff in an action for breach of promise of marriage. When the consultation took place, he inquired whether the lady for whose injury he was to seek redress was good-looking. ”Very handsome indeed, sir,” was the a.s.surance of her attorney. ”Then, sir,” replied Lee, ”I beg you will request her to be in Court, and in a place where she can be seen.” The attorney promised compliance, and the lady, in accordance with Lee's wishes, took her seat in a conspicuous place, where the jury could see her. Lee, in addressing the jury, did not fail to insist with great warmth on the ”abominable cruelty” which had been exercised towards ”the highly attractive and modest girl who trusted her cause to their discernment”; and did not sit down until he had succeeded in working upon their feelings with great and, as he thought, successful effect. The counsel on the other side, however, speedily broke the spell with which Lee had enchanted the jury, by observing that ”his learned friend, in describing the graces and beauty of the plaintiff, ought in common fairness not to have concealed from the jury the fact that the lady had a _wooden leg_!” The Court was convulsed with laughter at this discovery, while Lee, who was ignorant of this circ.u.mstance, looked aghast; and the jury, ashamed of the influence that mere eloquence had had upon them, returned a verdict for the defendant.
Justice Willes, the son of Chief Justice Willes, had an offensive habit of interrupting counsel. On one occasion an old pract.i.tioner was so irritated by this practice that he retorted sharply by saying, ”Your lords.h.i.+p doubtless shows greater acuteness even than your father, the Chief Justice, for he used to understand me _after I had done_, but your lords.h.i.+p understands me even _before I have begun_.”
Of Whigham, a later leader on the Northern Circuit, an amusing story used to be told. He was defending a prisoner, and opened an alibi in his address to the jury, undertaking to prove it by calling the person who had been in bed with his client at the time in question, and deprecating their evil opinion of a woman whose moral character was clearly open to grave reproach, but who was still ent.i.tled to be believed upon her oath.
Then he called ”Jessie Crabtree.” The name was, as usual, repeated by the crier, and there came pus.h.i.+ng his way st.u.r.dily through the crowd a big Lancas.h.i.+re lad in his rough dress, who had been the prisoner's veritable bedfellow--Whigham's brief not having explained to him that the Christian name of his witness was, in this case, a male one.
Colman, in his _Random Records_, tells the following anecdote of the witty barrister, Mr. Jekyll. One day observing a squirrel in Colman's chambers, in the usual round cage, performing the same operation as a man in a tread-mill, and looking at it for a minute, exclaimed, ”Oh!
poor devil, he's going the Home Circuit.”
Jekyll was asked why he no longer spoke to a lawyer named Peat; to which he replied, ”I choose to give up his acquaintance--I have common of turbary, and have a right to cut _peat_!” An impromptu of his on a learned serjeant who was holding the Court of Common Pleas with his glittering eye, is well known:
”Behold the serjeant full of fire, Long shall his hearers rue it, His purple garments _came_ from Tyre, His arguments _go to it_.”
Mr. H. L. Adam, in his volume _The Story of Crime_, tells an amusing story of a prisoner whose counsel had successfully obtained his acquittal on a charge of brutal a.s.sault. A policeman came across a man one night lying unconscious on the pavement, and near by him was an ordinary ”bowler” hat. That was the only clue to the perpetrator of the deed. The police had their suspicions of a certain individual, whom they proceeded to interrogate. In addition to being unable to give a satisfactory account of his movements on the night of the a.s.sault, it was found that the ”bowler” hat in question fitted him like a glove. He was accordingly arrested and charged with the crime, the hat being the chief evidence against him. Counsel for the defence, however, dwelt so impressively on the risk of accepting such evidence that the jury brought in a verdict of ”not proven,” and the prisoner was discharged.
Before leaving the dock he turned to the judge, and pointing to the hat in Court, said, ”My lord, may I 'ave my 'at.”
Some amusing scenes have occurred in suits brought by tailors and dressmakers to recover the price of garments for which their customers have declined to pay on the ground of misfit. Serjeant Ballantine, in his _Experiences of a Barrister_, relates the case of a tailor in which the defendant was the famous Sir Edwin Landseer. It was tried in the Exchequer Court, before Baron Martin. ”The coat was produced,” says the serjeant, ”and the judge suggested that Sir Edwin should try it on; he made a wry face, but consented, and took off his own upper garment. He then put an arm into one of the sleeves of that in dispute, and made an apparently ineffectual endeavour to reach the other, following it round amidst roars of laughter from all parts of the Court. It was a common jury, and I was told that there was a tailor upon it, upon which I suggested that there was a gentleman of the same profession as the plaintiff in Court who might a.s.sist Sir Edwin. This was acceded to, and out hopped a little Hebrew slop-seller from the Minories, to whom the defendant submitted his body. With difficulty he got into the coat, and then stood as if spitted, his back one ma.s.s of wrinkles. The tableau was truly amusing; the indignant plaintiff looking at the performance with mingled horror and disgust; Sir Edwin, as if he were choking; whilst the juryman, with the air of a connoisseur, was examining him and the coat with profound gravity. At last the judge, when able to stifle his laughter, addressing the little Hebrew, said, 'Well, Mr. Moses, what do you say?'--'Oh,' cried he, holding up a pair of hands not over clean, and very different from those encased in lavender gloves which graced the plaintiff, 'it ish pos.h.i.+tively shocking, my lord; I should have been ashamed to turn out such a thing from my establishment.' The rest of the jury accepted his view, and Sir Edwin, apparently relieved from suffocation, entered his own coat with a look of relief, which again convulsed the Court, bowed, and departed.”
Financial prosecutions are as a rule very dreary, and any little joke perpetrated by counsel during the course of them is a relief. One was being heard, in which Mr. Muir was counsel, and to many of his statements the junior counsel for the prosecution shook his head vehemently, although he said nothing. This continual dumb contradiction at length got on the customary patience of Mr. Muir, who blurted out: ”I do not know why my friend keeps shaking his head, whether it is that he has palsy, or that there's nothing in it!”
Mr. Baldwin was the counsel employed to oppose a person justifying bail in the Court of King's Bench. After some common questions, a waggish counsel sitting near suggested that the witness should be asked as to his having been a prisoner in Gloucester gaol. Mr. Baldwin thereon boldly asked: ”When, sir, were you last in Gloucester gaol?” The witness, a respectable tradesman, with astonishment declared that he never was in a gaol in his life. Mr. Baldwin being foiled after putting the question in various ways, turned round to his friendly prompter, and asked for what the man had been imprisoned. He was told that it was for suicide. Thereupon Mr. Baldwin, with great gravity and solemnity addressed the witness: ”Now, sir, I ask you upon your oath, and remember that I shall have your words taken down, were you not imprisoned in Gloucester gaol for suicide?”