"An estate in fee-simple is the highest estate known to the law of England. The Court, sir, is indebted to you for this information." There was only one person present who did not perceive the irony, and that was the learned counsel who incurred it. But though impervious to irony, it was impossible even for his self-love to avoid understanding the home-thrust lunged by the judge at the conclusion of his harangue. He had exhausted the year-books and all the mysteries of the real property law in a sleepy oration, which effectually cleared the Court, insensible alike to the grim repose of the bench and the yawning impatience of the ushers; when, at the close of some parenthetical and apparently interminable sentences, the clock struck four, and the judges started to their feet, he appealed to know when it would be their pleasure to hear the remainder of his argument. "Mr. P.," rejoined the Chief Justice, "we are bound to hear you, and shall do so on Friday, but pleasure has long been out of the question."

is

Ellenborough was once strangely posed by a witness, a labouring bricklayer, who came to be sworn. Really, witness," said the Lord Chief Justice, "when you have to appear before this Court, it your bounden duty to be more clean and decent in your appearance." "Upon my life," said the witness, "if your lordship come to that, I'm every bit as well dressed as your lordship." "How do you mean, sir?" said his lordship, angrily. "Why, faith," said the labourer, "you come here in your working-clothes, and I'm come in mine."

"In

V.

I rule

When Lord Ellenborough was Attorney-General, he was one day listening with some impatience to the judgment of a learned judge, afterwards his colleague, who said, that," &c. "You rule!" said the Attorney-General, in a tone of suppressed indignation, but loud enough to be heard by many of the bar,-"You rule! you were never fit for ruling anything but a copybook!"

A Quaker coming into the witness-box at Guildhall without a broad brim or dittoes, and rather smartly dressed, the crier put the book into his hand and was about to administer the oath, when he required to be examined on his affirmation. Lord Ellenborough asking if he was really a Quaker, and being answered in the affirmative, exclaimed, "Do you really mean to impose upon the Court by appearing here in the disguise of a reasonable being ?"

A witness dressed in a fantastical manner, having given very rambling and discreditable evidence, was asked, in cross-examination, "What he was?" Witness." I employ myself as a surgeon." Lord Ellenborough, C.J." But does any one else employ you as a surgeon ?"

Henry Hunt, the famous demagogue, having been brought up to receive sentence upon a conviction for holding a seditious meeting, began his address in mitigation of punishment, by complaining of certain persons who had accused him of "stirring up the people by dangerous eloquence." Lord Ellenborough, C.J. (in a very mild tone)— "My impartiality as a judge calls upon me to say, sir, that in accusing you of that they do you great injustice."

A very tedious Bishop having yawned during his own speech, Lord Ellenborough exclaimed, "Come, come, the fellow shows some symptoms of taste, but this is encroaching on our province."

At the coming-in of the "Talents" in 1806, Erskine himself pressed the Great Seal upon Ellenborough, saying that "he would add to the splendour of his reputation as Lord Chancellor." Ellenborough, knowing that on his own refusal Erskine was to be the man, exclaimed, "How can you ask me to accept the office of Lord Chancellor, when I know as little of its duties as you do?"

Lord Ellenborough's manner was very peculiar, and was so closely imitated by Charles Mathews, the elder, in the character of Flexible, in the farce of Love, Law, and Physic, that soon after the production of that piece, Mathews received a hint from the Lord Chamberlain's office to desist from so telling a piece of mimicry.

Lord Ellenborough had no mean power of ridicule-as playful as a mind, more strong than refined, could make it; while of sarcasm he was an eminent professor, but of the kind which hacks, and tears, and flays its victims, rather than destroys by cutting keenly. His interrogative exclamation in Lord Melville's case, when the party's ignorance of having taken accommodation out of the public fund was alleged—indeed was proved-may be remembered as very picturesque, though perhaps more pungent than dignified. "Not know money? Did he see it when it glittered? Did he hear it when it chinked?" When a favourite special pleader was making an excursion, somewhat unexpected by his hearers, as unwonted in him, into a pathetic topic-"Ain't we, sir, rather getting into the high sentimental latitudes now?"

The author of the clever Criticisms on the Bar (first printed in the Examiner, 1818) was no admirer of the general deportment of Lord Ellenborough, either on or off the Bench: "but," he adds, "it is not unfrequently a very useful lesson, and a very fine display of power, to witness the manner in which he drives directly onward to the just end of a cause-like a mighty elephant in a forest, trampling down the low brushwood under his feet, and tearing away all the minor branches that obstruct his impetuous progress.'

Lord Ellenborough's reply to William Hone's "My Lord, I pro

test, my Lord, I protest," was "Protest, and go about your business!" In one of his trials Hone asserted that there was not a single counsel who would venture to support his own convictions against the opinion of a presiding judge; and the author of Criticisms on the Bar ventures to say, "There was not a single Barrister present, whose hollow bosom did not echo the sentence, and silently admit its truth!"

JOHN SCOTT AND JAMES BOSWELL.

These capital stories are related in Lord Eldon's Anecdote-Book :— "At an assize at Lancaster, we found Dr. Johnson's friend, Jemmy Boswell, lying upon the pavement--inebriated. We subscribed at supper a guinea for him and half-a-crown for his clerk, and sent him, when he waked next morning, a brief with instructions to move, for what we denominated the writ of Quare adhæsit pavimento,' with observations duly calculated to induce him to think that it required great learning to explain the necessity of granting it, to the judge before whom he was to move. Boswell sent all round the town to attorneys for books, that might enable him to distinguish himself—but He moved, however, for the writ, making the best use he could of the observations in the brief. The judge was perfectly astonished, and the audience amazed. The judge said, 'I never heard of such a writ—what can it be that adheres pavimento?-Are any of you gentlemen at the Bar able to explain this?' The Bar laughed. At last one of them said, 'My lord, Mr. Boswell last night adhæsit pavimento. There was no moving him for some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has been dreaming about himself and the pavement.'

in vain.

He

"Jemmy Boswell called upon me at my chambers in Lincoln's Inn, desiring to know what would be my definition of Taste. I told him I must decline informing him how I should define it;-because I knew he would publish what I said would be my definition of it, and I did not choose to subject my notion of it to public criticism. continued, however, his importunities in frequent calls, and, in one, complained much that I would not give him my definition of taste, as he had that morning got Henry Dundas's (afterwards Lord Melville), Sir Archibald Macdonald's, and John Anstruther's definitions of taste. 'Well then,' I said, 'Boswell, we must have an end of this. Taste, according to my definition, is the judgment which Dundas, Macdonald, Anstruther, and you manifested, when you determined to quit Scotland, and to come into the south. You may publish this if you please.'

LORD ELDON'S BEGINNINGS.

Mr. Scott finally removed to London in 1775, considerably depressed in spirit as to his future prospects, which is not surprising, considering that he was almost without a sixpence he could call his own, to support himself, his wife, and by this time their infant child, John. His first house was in Cursitor-street, of which he used to say-" Many a time have I run down from Cursitor-street to FleetMarket, to get sixpenny-worth of sprats for supper."

"When I was called to the Bar," said he to Mrs. Forster, "Bessy and I thought all our troubles were over: business was to pour in, and we were to be made almost rich immediately. So I made a bargain with her, that during the following year, all the money I should receive in the first eleven months should be mine, and whatever I should get in the twelfth month should be hers. What a stingy dog I must have been to make such a bargain! I would not have done so afterwards. But however, so it was; that was our agreement; and how do you think it turned out? In the twelfth month I received half a guinea; eighteenpence went for fees, and Bessy got nine shillings in the other eleven months I got not one shilling."

HERMAND AND ELDON.

These great lawyers, when young, were very intimate. They were counsel together in the latter's first important Scotch entail case in the House of Lords. Scott was so much alarmed that he wrote his intended speech, and begged Hermand to dine with him at a tavern, where he read the paper, and asked him if he thought it would do. Do, sir, it is delightful-absolutely delightful! I could listen to it for ever; it is so beautifully written, and so beautifully read! But, sir, it's the greatest nonsense! It may do very well for an English chancellor; but it would disgrace a clerk with us."

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A STRANGE STORY.

Lord Eldon, in his Anecdote-Book, relates the following extraordinary circumstances of the identifying of two murderers :

"I remember, in one case where I was counsel, for a long time the evidence did not appear to touch the prisoner at all, and he looked about him with the most perfect unconcern, seeming to think himself quite safe. At last the surgeon was called, who stated deceased had been killed by a shot, a gunshot in the head; and he produced the matted hair and stuff cut from and taken out of the wound. It was all hardened with blood. A basin of warm water was brought into court, and as the blood was gradually softened, a piece of printed paper appeared, the wadding of the gun, which proved to be the half

of a ballad. The other half had been found in the man's pocket when he was taken. He was hanged.

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"I remember one man taken up twelve years after the deed. He had made his escape; and though every search was made, he could not be found. Twelve years afterwards, the brother of the murdered man was at Liverpool in a public-house. He fell asleep, and was awoke by some one picking his pocket; he started, exclaiming, Good God! the man that killed my brother twelve years ago!' Assistance came to him, the man was secured, tried, and condemned. He had enlisted as a soldier and gone to India immediately after the deed was committed; and he had just landed at Liverpool on his return, when his first act was to pick the pocket of the brother of the man he had murdered twelve years before. It was very extraordinary that the man, waking out of his sleep, should so instantly know him."

"HOBSON'S CHOICE."

In Lord Eldon's Anecdote-Book, too, we find also the following ludicrous case :

"I was at the assizes for Cumberland in seven successive years before I had a brief. It happened that my old friend Mr. Lee, commonly called Jack Lee, was absent in the Criminal Court when a cause was called on in the Civil Court, and some attorney being by that absence deprived of his retained counsel, was obliged to procure another, and he gave me a guinea, with a scrap of paper as a brief, to defend an old woman in an action for an assault brought against her by another old woman. The plaintiff had been reposing in an arm-chair, when some words arising between her and my client, the latter took hold of the legs of the chair, and in fact threw the plaintiff head and heels over the top of the chair. This sort of assault of course admitted of easy proof, and a servant-maid of the plaintiff's proved the case. I then offered in Court that a chair should be brought in, and that my old female client should place herself in it, and that the lady (the plaintiff) should overset the chair and my old woman, as she had been upset herself. Upon the plaintiff's attorney refusing this compromise, the witness (the servantmaid) said that her mistress (the plaintiff) was always willing to make up the matter, but that her attorney would never allow her to do so; and that her mistress thought she must do as her attorney bid her do, and had no will of her own. 'So then,' observed I to the jury, knowing that her attorney's name was Hobson, 'this good lady has had nothing for it but Hobson's choice. And pray, then, gentlemen,' I added, as the good woman wants no damages, and the cause is Hobson's, give him but a penny, at most, if you please.

i