HUMOROUS STORIES.

Alike commendable for its subtlety and inoffensive humor was the pleasantry with which young Philip Yorke (afterwards Lord Hardwicke), answered Sir Lyttleton Powys's banter on the Western Circuit. An amiable and upright, but far from brilliant judge, Sir Lyttleton had a few pet phrases—-amongst them, "I humbly conceive," and "Look, do you see"—which he sprinkled over his judgments and colloquial talk with ridiculous profuseness. Surprised at Yorke's sudden rise into lucrative practice, this most gentlemanlike worthy was pleased to account for the unusual success by maintaining that young Mr. Yorke must have written a law-book, which had brought him early into favor with the inferior branch of the profession. "Mr. Yorke," said the venerable justice, whilst the barristers were sitting over their wine at a 'judges' dinner,' "I cannot well account for your having so much business, considering how short a time you have been at the bar: I humbly conceive you must have published something; for look you, do you see, there is scarcely a cause in court but you are employed in it on one side or the other. I should therefore be glad to know, Mr. Yorke, do you see, whether this be the case." Playfully denying that he possessed any celebrity as a writer on legal matters, Yorke, with an assumption of candor, admitted that he had some thoughts of lightening the labors of law-students by turning Coke upon Littleton into verse. Indeed, he confessed that he had already begun the work of versification. Not seeing the nature of the reply, Sir Lyttleton Powys treated the droll fancy as a serious project, and insisted that the author should give a specimen of the style of his contemplated work. Whereupon the young barrister—not pausing to remind a company of lawyers of the words of the original. "Tenant in fee simple is he which hath lands or tenements to hold to him and his heirs for ever"—recited the lines—

"He that holdeth his lands in fee
Need neither to quake nor quiver,
I humbly conceive: for look, do you see
They are his and his heirs' forever."

The mimicry of voice being not less perfect than the verbal imitation, Yorke's hearers were convulsed with laughter, but so unconscious was Sir Lyttleton of the ridicule which he had incurred, that on subsequently encountering Yorke in London, he asked how "that translation of Coke upon Littleton was getting on." Sir Lyttleton died in 1732, and exactly ten years afterwards appeared the first edition of 'The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt., in Verse'—a work which its author may have been inspired to undertake by Philip Yorke's proposal to versify 'Coke on Littleton.'

Had Yorke's project been carried out, lawyers would have a large supply of that comic but sound literature of which Sir James Burrow's Reports contain a specimen in the following poetical version of Chief Justice Pratt's memorable decision with regard to a woman of English birth, who was the widow of a foreigner:

"A woman having settlement
Married a man with none,
The question was, he being dead,
If what she had was gone.
"Quoth Sir John Pratt, 'The settlement
Suspended did remain,
Living the husband; but him dead
It doth revive again.'
(Chorus of Puisne Judges.)
"Living the husband; but him dead
It doth revive again."

Chief Justice Pratt's decision on this point having been reversed by his successor, Chief Justice Ryder's judgment was thus reported:

"A woman having a settlement,
Married a man with none,
He flies and leaves her destitute;
What then is to be done?
"Quoth Ryder, the Chief Justice,
'In spite of Sir John Pratt,
You'll send her to the parish
In which she was a brat.
"'Suspension of a settlement
Is not to be maintained;
That which she had by birth subsists
Until another's gained.'
(Chorus of Puisne Judges.)
"That which she had by birth subsists
Until another's gained."

In the early months of his married life, whilst playing the part of an Oxford don, Lord Eldon was required to decide in an important action brought by two undergraduates against the cook of University College. The plaintiffs declared that the cook had "sent to their rooms an apple-pie that could not be eaten." The defendant pleaded that he had a remarkably fine fillet of veal in the kitchen. Having set aside this plea on grounds obvious to the legal mind, and not otherwise then manifest to unlearned laymen, Mr. John Scott ordered the apple-pie to be brought in court; but the messenger, dispatched to do the judge's bidding, returned with the astounding intelligence that during the progress of the litigation a party of undergraduates had actually devoured the pie—fruit and crust. Nothing but the pan was left. Judgment: "The charge here is, that the cook has sent up an apple-pie that cannot be eaten. Now that cannot be said to have been uneatable which has been eaten; and as this apple-pie has been eaten, it was eatable. Let the cook be absolved."

But of all the judicial decisions on record, none was delivered with more comical effect than Lord Loughborough's decision not to hear a cause brought on a wager about a point in the game of 'Hazard.' A constant frequenter of Brookes's and White's, Lord Loughborough was well known by men of fashion to be fairly versed in the mysteries of gambling, though no evidence has ever been found in support of the charge that he was an habitual dicer. That he ever lost much by play is improbable; but the scandal-mongers of Westminster had some plausible reasons for laughing at the virtuous indignation of the spotless Alexander Wedderburn, who, whilst sitting at Nisi Prius, exclaimed, "Do not swear the jury in this case, but let it be struck out of the paper. I will not try it. The administration of justice is insulted by the proposal that I should try it. To my astonishment I find that the action is brought on a wager as to the mode of playing an illegal, disreputable, and mischievous game called 'Hazard;' whether, allowing seven to be the main, and eleven to be a nick to seven, there are more ways than six of nicking seven on the dice? Courts of justice are constituted to try rights and redress injuries, not to solve the problems of the gamesters. The gentlemen of the jury and I may have heard of 'Hazard' as a mode of dicing by which sharpers live, and young men of family and fortune are ruined; but what do any of us know of 'seven being the main,' or 'eleven being the nick to seven?' Do we come here to be instructed in this lore, and are the unusual crowds (drawn hither, I suppose, by the novelty of the expected entertainment) to take a lesson with us in these unholy mysteries, which they are to practice in the evening in the low gaming-houses in St. James Street, pithily called by a name which should inspire a salutary terror of entering them? Again, I say, let the cause be struck out of the paper. Move the court, if you please, that it may be restored, and if my brethren think that I do wrong in the course that I now take, I hope that one of them will officiate for me here, and save me from the degradation of trying 'whether there be more than six ways of nicking seven on the dice, allowing seven to be the main and eleven to be a nick to seven'—a question, after all, admitting of no doubt, and capable of mathematical demonstration."

With equal fervor Lord Kenyon inveighed against the pernicious usage of gambling, urging that the hells of St. James's should, be indicted as common nuisances. The 'legal monk,' as Lord Carlisle stigmatized him for his violent denunciations of an amusement countenanced by women of the highest fashion, even went so far as to exclaim—"If any such prosecutions are fairly brought before me, and the guilty parties are convicted, whatever may be their rank or station in the country, though they may be the first ladies in the land, they shall certainly exhibit themselves in the pillory."

The same considerations, which decided Lord Loughborough not to try an action brought by a wager concerning chicken-hazard, made Lord Ellenborough decline to hear a cause where the plaintiff sought to recover money wagered on a cock-fight. "There is likewise," said Lord Ellenborough, "another principle on which I think an action on such wagers cannot be maintained. They tend to the degradation of courts of justice. It is impossible to be engaged in ludicrous inquiries of this sort consistently with that dignity which it is essential to the public welfare that a court of justice should always preserve. I will not try the plaintiff's right to recover the four guineas, which might involve questions on the weight of the cocks and the construction of their steel spurs."

It has already been remarked that in all ages the wits of Westminster Hall have delighted in puns; and it may be here added, with the exception of some twenty happy verbal freaks, the puns of lawyers have not been remarkable for their excellence. L'Estrange records that when a stone was hurled by a convict from the dock at Charles I.'s Chief Justice Richardson, and passed just over the head of the judge, who happened to be sitting at ease and lolling on his elbow, the learned man smiled, and observed to those who congratulated him on his escape, "You see now, if I had been an upright judge I had been slaine." Under George III. Joseph Jekyll[30] was at the same time the brightest wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the court where he was sitting—

"The sergeants are a grateful race,
Their dress and language show it;
Their purple garments come from Tyre,
Their arguments go to it."

When Garrow, by a more skilful than successful cross-examination, was endeavoring to lure a witness (an unmarried lady of advanced years) into an acknowledgment that payment of certain money in dispute had been tendered, Jekyll threw him this couplet—

"Garrow, forbear; that tough old jade
Will never prove a tender maid."

So also, when Lord Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott each made a stand in court for his favorite pronunciation of the word 'lien;' Lord Eldon calling the word lion and Sir Arthur maintaining that it was to be pronounced like lean, Jekyll, with an allusion to the parsimonious arrangements of the Chancellor's kitchen, perpetrated the jeu d'esprit—

"Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, why what do you mean
By saying the Chancellor's lion is lean?
D'ye think that his kitchen's so bad as all that,
That nothing within it can ever get fat?"

By this difference concerning the pronunciation of a word the present writer is reminded of an amicable contest that occurred in Westminster Hall between Lord Campbell and a Q.C. who is still in the front rank of court-advocates. In an action brought to recover for damages done to a carriage, the learned counsel repeatedly called, the vehicle in question a broug-ham, pronouncing both syllables of the word brougham. Whereupon, Lord Campbell with considerable pomposity observed, "Broom is the more usual pronunciation; a carriage of the kind you mean is generally and not incorrectly called a broom—that pronunciation is open to no grave objection, and it has the great advantage of saving the time consumed by uttering an extra syllable." Half an hour later in the same trial Lord Campbell, alluding to a decision given in a similar action, said, "In that case the carriage which had sustained injury was an omnibus——" "Pardon me, my lord," interposed the Queen's Counsel, with such promptitude that his lordship was startled into silence, "a carriage of the kind, to which you draw attention is usually termed 'bus;' that pronunciation is open to no grave objection, and it has the great advantage of saving the time consumed by uttering two extra syllables." The interruption was followed by a roar of laughter, in which Lord Campbell joined more heartily than any one else.

One of Jekyll's happy sayings was spoken at Exeter, when he defended several needlemen who were charged with raising a riot for the purpose of forcing the master-tailors to give higher wages. Whilst Jekyll was examining a witness as to the number of tailors present at the alleged riot, Lord Eldon—then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas—reminded him that three persons can make that which the law regards as a riot; whereupon the witty advocate answered, "Yes, my lord, Hale and Hawkins lay down the law as your lordship states it, and I rely on their authority; for if there must be three men to make a riot, the rioters being tailors, there must be nine times three present, and unless the prosecutor make out that there were twenty-seven joining in this breach of the peace, my clients are entitled to an acquittal." On Lord Eldon enquiring whether he relied on common-law or statute-law, the counsel for the defence answered firmly, "My lord, I rely on a well-known maxim, as old as Magna Charta, Nine Tailors make a Man." Finding themselves unable to reward a lawyer for so excellent a jest with an adverse verdict, the jury acquitted the prisoners. Towards the close of his career Eldon made a still better jest than this of Jekyll's concerning tailors. In 1829, when Lyndhurst was occupying the woolsack for the first time, and Eldon was longing to recover the seals, the latter presented a petition from the Tailors' Company at Glasgow against Catholic Belief.

"What!" asked Lord Lyndhurst from the woolsack, in a low voice, "do the tailors trouble themselves about such measures?" Whereto, with unaccustomed quickness, the old Tory of the Tories retorted, "No wonder; you can't suppose that tailors like turncoats."

As specimens of a kind of pleasantry becoming more scarce every year, some of Sir George Rose's court witticisms are excellent. When Mr. Beams, the reporter, defended himself against the friction of passing barristers by a wooden bar, the flimsiness of which was pointed out to Sir George (then Mr. Rose), the wit answered—

"Yes—the partition is certainly thin—
Yet thick enough, truly, the Beams within."

The same originator of happy sayings pointed to Eldon's characteristic weakness in the lines—

"Mr. Leach made a speech,
Pithy, clear, and strong;
Mr. Hart, on the other part,
Was prosy, dull, and long;
Mr. Parker made that darker
Which was dark enough without;
Mr. Bell spoke so well,
That the Chancellor said—'I doubt.'"

Far from being offended by this allusion to his notorious mental infirmity, Lord Eldon, shortly after the verses had floated into circulation, concluded one of his decisions by saying, with a significant smile, "And here the Chancellor does not doubt."

Not less remarkable for precipitancy than Eldon for procrastination, Sir John Leach, Vice-Chancellor, was said to have done more mischief by excessive haste in a single term than Eldon in his whole life wrought through extreme caution. The holders of this opinion delighted to repeat the poor and not perspicuous lines—

"In equity's high court there are
Two sad extremes, 'tis clear;
Excessive slowness strikes us there,
Excessive quickness here.
"Their source, 'twixt good and evil, brings
A difficulty nice;
The first from Eldon's virtue, springs,
The latter from his vice."

It is needless to remark that this attempt to gloss the Chancellor's shortcomings is an illustration of the readiness with which censors apologize for the misdeeds of eminently fortunate offenders. Whilst Eldon's procrastination and Leach's haste were thus put in contrast, an epigram also placed the Chancellor's frailty in comparison with the tedious prolixity of the Master of the Rolls—

"To cause delay in Lincoln's Inn
Two diff'rent methods tend:
His lordship's judgments ne'er begin,
His honors never end."

A mirth-loving judge, Justice Powell, could be as thoroughly humorous in private life as he was fearless and just upon the bench. Swift describes him as a surpassingly merry old gentleman, laughing heartily at all comic things, and his own droll stories more than aught else. In court he could not always refrain from jocularity. For instance, when he tried Jane Wenham for witch-craft, and she assured him that she could fly, his eye twinkled as he answered, "Well, then you may; there is no law against flying." When Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester—a thorough believer in what is now-a-days called spiritualism—was persecuting his acquaintance with silly stories about ghosts, Powell gave him a telling reproof for his credulity by describing a horrible apparition which was represented as having disturbed the narrator's rest on the previous night. At the hour of midnight, as the clocks were striking twelve, the judge was roused from his first slumber by a hideous sound. Starting up, he saw at the foot of his uncompanioned bed a figure—dark, gloomy, terrible, holding before its grim and repulsive visage a lamp that shed an uncertain light. "May Heaven have mercy on us!" tremulously ejaculated the bishop at this point of the story. The judge continued his story: "Be calm, my lord bishop; be calm. The awful part of this mysterious interview has still to be told. Nerving myself to fashion the words of inquiry, I addressed the nocturnal visitor thus—'Strange being, why hast thou come at this still hour to perturb a sinful mortal?' You understand, my lord, I said this in hollow tones—in what I may almost term a sepulchral voice." "Ay—ay," responded the bishop, with intense excitement; "go on—I implore you to go on. What did it answer?" "It answered in a voice not greatly different from the voice of a human creature—'Please, sir, I am the watchman on beat, and your street-door is open.'" Readers will remember the use which Barham has made of this story in the Ingoldsby Legends.

As a Justice of the King's Bench, Powell had in Chief Justice Holt an associate who could not only appreciate the wit of others, but could himself say smart things. When Lacy, the fanatic, forced his way into Holt's house in Bedford Row, the Chief Justice was equal to the occasion. "I come to you," said Lacy, "a prophet from the Lord God, who has sent me to thee and would have thee grant a nolle prosequi for John Atkins, his servant, whom thou hast sent to prison." Whereto the judge answered, with proper emphasis, "Thou art a false prophet and a lying knave. If the Lord God had sent thee, it would have been to the Attorney General, for the Lord God knows that it belongeth not to the Chief Justice, to grant a nolle prosequi; but I, as Chief Justice, can grant a warrant to commit thee to John Atkins's company." Whereupon the false prophet, sharing the fate of many a true one, was forthwith clapped in prison.

Now that so much has been said of Thurlow's brutal sarcasms, justice demands for his memory an acknowledgment that he possessed a vein of genuine humor that could make itself felt without wounding. In his undergraduate days at Cambridge he is said to have worried the tutors of Caius with a series of disorderly pranks and impudent escapades, but on one occasion he unquestionably displayed at the university the quick wit that in after life rescued him from many an embarrassing position. "Sir," observed a tutor, giving the unruly undergraduate a look of disapproval, "I never come to the window without seeing you idling in the court." "Sir," replied young Thurlow, imitating the don's tone, "I never come into the court without seeing you idling at the window." Years later, when he had become a great man, and John Scott was paying him assiduous court, Thurlow said, in ridicule of the mechanical awkwardness of many successful equity draughtsmen, "Jack Scott, don't you think we could invent a machine to draw bills and answers in Chancery?" Having laughed at the suggestion when it was made, Scott put away the droll thought in his memory; and when he had risen to be Attorney General reminded Lord Thurlow of it under rather awkward circumstances. Macnamara, the conveyancer, being concerned as one of the principals in a Chancery suit, Lord Thurlow advised him to submit the answer to the bill filed against him to the Attorney General. In due course the answer came under Scott's notice, when he found it so wretchedly drawn, that he advised Macnamara to have another answer drawn by some one who understood pleading. On the same day he was engaged at the bar of the House of Lords, when Lord Thurlow came to him, and said, "So I understand you don't think my friend Mac's answer will do?" "Do!" Scott replied, contemptuously. "My Lord, it won't do at all! it must have been drawn by that wooden machine which you once told me might be invented to draw bills and answers." "That's very unlucky," answered Thurlow, "and impudent too, if you had known—that I drew the answer myself."

Lord Lyndhurst used to maintain that it was one of the chief duties of a judge to render it disagreeable to counsel to talk nonsense. Jeffreys in his milder moments no doubt salved his conscience with the same doctrine, when he recalled how, after elating him with a compliment, he struck down the rising junior with "Lord, sir! you must be cackling too. We told you, Mr. Bradbury, your objection was very ingenious; that must not make you troublesome: you cannot lay an egg, but you must be cackling over it." Doubtless, also, he felt it one of the chief duties of a judge to restrain attorneys from talking nonsense when—on hearing that the solicitor from whom he received his first brief had boastfully remarked, in allusion to past services, "My Lord Chancellor! I made him!"—he exclaimed, "Well, then, I'll lay my maker by the heels," and forthwith committed his former client and patron to the Fleet prison. If this bully of the bench actually, as he is said to have done, interrupted the venerable Maynard by saying, "You have lost your knowledge of law; your memory, I tell you, is failing through old age," how must every hearer of the speech have exulted when Maynard quietly answered, "Yes, Sir George, I have forgotten more law than you ever learned; but allow me to say, I have not forgotten much."

On the other hand it should be remembered that Maynard was a man eminently qualified to sow violent animosities, and that he was a perpetual thorn in the flesh of the political barristers, whose principles he abhorred. A subtle and tricky man, he was constantly misleading judges by citing fictitious authorities, and then smiling at their professional ignorance when they had swallowed his audacious fabrications. Moreover, the manner of his speech was sometimes as offensive as its substance was dishonest. Strafford spoke a bitter criticism not only with regard to Maynard and Glyn, but with regard to the prevailing tone of the bar, when, describing the conduct of the advocates who managed his prosecution, he said: "Glynne and Maynard used me like advocates, but Palmer and Whitelock like gentlemen; and yet the latter left out nothing against me that was material to be urged against me." As a Devonshire man Maynard is one of the many cases which may be cited against the smart saying of Sergeant Davy, who used to observe: "The further I journey toward the West, the more convinced I am that the wise men come from the East." But shrewd, observant, liberal though he was in most respects, he was on one matter so far behind the spirit of the age that, blinded and ruled by an unwise sentiment, he gave his parliamentary support to an abortive measure "to prevent further building in London and the neighborhood." In support of this measure he observed, "This building is the ruin of the gentry and ruin of religion, as leaving many good people without churches to go to. This enlarging of London makes it filled with lacqueys and pages. In St. Giles's parish scarce the fifth part come to church, and we shall have no religion at last."

Whilst justice has suffered something in respect of dignity from the overbearing temper of judges to counsel, from collisions of the bench with the bar, and from the mutual hostility of rival advocates, she has at times sustained even greater injury from the jealousies and altercations of judges. Too often wearers of the ermine, sitting on the same bench, nominally for the purpose of assisting each other, have roused the laughter of the bar, and the indignation of suitors, by their petty squabbles. "It now comes to my turn," an Irish judge observed, when it devolved on him to support the decision of one or the other of two learned coadjutors, who had stated with more fervor than courtesy altogether irreconcilable opinions—"It now comes to my turn to declare my view of the case, and fortunately I can be brief. I agree with my brother A, from the irresistible force of my brother B's arguments." Extravagant as this case may appear, the King's Bench of Westminster Hall, under Mansfield and Kenyon, witnessed several not less scandalous and comical differences. Taking thorough pleasure in his work, Lord Mansfield was not less industrious than impartial in the discharge of his judicial functions; so long as there was anything for him to learn with regard to a cause, he not only sought for it with pains but with a manifest pleasure similar to that delight in judicial work which caused the French Advocate, Cottu, to say of Mr. Justice Bayley: "Il s'amuse À juger:" but notwithstanding these good qualities, he was often culpably deficient in respect for the opinions of his subordinate coadjutors. At times a vain desire to impress on the minds of spectators that his intellect was the paramount power of the bench; at other times a personal dislike to one of his puisnes caused him to derogate from the dignity of his court, in cases where he was especially careful to protect the interests of suitors. With silence more disdainful than any words could have been, he used to turn away from Mr. Justice Willes, at the moment when the latter expected his chief to ask his opinion; and on such occasions the indignant puisne seldom had the prudence and nerve to conceal his mortification. "I have not been consulted, and I will be heard!" he once shrieked forth in a paroxysm of rage caused by Mansfield's contemptuous treatment; and forty years afterwards Jeremy Bentham, who was a witness of the insult and its effect, observed: "At this distance of time—five-and-thirty or forty years—the feminine scream issuing out of his manly frame still tingles in my ears." Mansfield's overbearing demeanor to his puisnes was reproduced with less dignity by his successor; but Buller, the judge who wore ermine whilst he was still in his thirty-third year, and who confessed that his "idea of heaven was to sit at Nisi Prius all day, and to play whist all night," seized the first opportunity to give Taffy Kenyon a lesson in good manners by stating, with impressive self-possession and convincing logic, the reasons which induced him to think the judgment delivered by his chief to be altogether bad in law and argument.