The laureate of the Home Circuit. scene, we may suppose, is the mess dinner at Lewes or Maidstone, and the poet thus apostrophizes the aspiring pleader, "pale incarnation of a Surrebutter:" Bramwell had at first the fate of most men who come to the Bar with no Much smaller powerful connections. than it now is-more like a big college at Oxford or Cambridge-a distinctly able man was more likely to be quickly Gaze round the board and see each manly picked out than he is now. Mr. Bram. brow See wily Chambers' scowl at thee askance. howl; 5 While in full chorus all the Session's lead well did not at once leap into practice, nor had he to wait idle for years. His merits were solid, if not brilliant; and he was not troubled with diffidence or self-consciousness. "There are modest men," he once said; "I am not one of them." The following is his account of his first brief: July 10.-Called to Bar on the 4th of May; had a brief from Rye on the 5th to move for a rule calling on an attorney to pay a sum of money pursuant to undertaking. I felt very wretched. However, Shout to a man, "Down, down with special cently, I am told. I was more angry than I got my rule and acquitted myself de ers pleaders!" Then look again, and see what fate attends Those hapless beings thou mayst call thy friends. frightened-more inclined to quarrel with any one who looked quizzical than afraid to speak. No doubt I was very agitatedso much so that I could hardly sign my name. My second case was at Nisi Prius Lo! where his timorous front great Ogle about five weeks afterwards, when I ex rears, A verdant junior of ingenuous years, Strives to look honest in a jury's face. And find for Noakes when he appears for The poet bids the rash aspirant Pause, then, and ponder whilst thou may est trace A backward march to thine own dwellingplace; amined a witness with great sang froid for plaintiff, the same for plaintiff, fourth for plaintiff; deserted by Kelly, addressed the jury for upwards of half an hour, with all the confidence of an old stager. Next day held a watching brief for Gunning, and was horribly nervous. Mem.-Succeeded in each, and was said to have managed my cause, when left by Kelly, very well. If so, it was comparatively only, for it certainly might have been better done, when I think of what I left undone and unsaid. But it was a trying case; lasted five hours, and on my conscience, I believe, (I) did it very tidily. Now I am being felicitated on having got called, because I have made as much again as I should have done at pleading. Quid Or should'st thy soul some Circuit crave to tamen? I have made between £50 and roam, Traverse all others and avoid the Home. fou, which is not at a rate which will keep me; and perhaps eventually I might have done better to plead longer. However, as in marrying, so in getting called; you get rid of the restlessness attending on the 3 Mr. Russell Gurney, afterwards recorder of possibility of a change, and must content London. 4 Sergeant Ballantine. 5 Afterwards Mr. Justice Willes. 6 A well-known pleader. yourself with the state you are in. When I consider my unhappiness the first time I was in court, how absurd it seems, how foolish to fret over that which must pass away so shortly. Only, as Voltaire says, "Je n'y vois pas de ressource,"-Zadig. I certainly like my present life better. It is more cheerful; the money is more easy to earn, to say nothing of there being more of it. fessional income in days when fees were much smaller, refreshers far rarer than they now are. At the Guild Hall he acquired a reputation second to none. Neither Byles nor Lush-to name two of his contemporaries on the same cir Lord Bramwell once described his cuit-had more briefs than he in comfirst success on Circuit thus: One day I was sitting in my chambers when there came a shagbag attorney with a brief for Maidstone, Platt to lead me. In the course of the case the counsel on the other side raised an objection. Platt answered the point indignantly, and the judge thought so. I whispered something to Platt, and found myself on my legs giving my answer. "Oh, that is quite a different matter, Mr. Platt," said the judge, satisfied and convinced. I sat down, having made a very good impression. I thought briefs would be showered upon me, but they were not-that attorneys would be at my chambers when I returned, but they were not. Still, from tnat time, somehow, I never looked back. Long before Bramwell had taken silk he had made good his footing. He was known to be the favorite pupil of Kelly, and he had the reputation of having as little nonsense in his composition as any man of his time. As all sorts of legends, for the most part full of exaggeration, circulate respecting the earnings of a successful barrister, we may give the actual amounts of Mr. Bramwell's fees. In the sixth year after his call his income was £850; in the seventh and eighth years it had risen to £1,187 68. and £1,533; and there is a note in the fee book of the latter year that Dowling, the wellknown law reporter, had betted him a dinner for four, that in three years he would confess to having passed all juniors on the Home Circuit. In 1851 he was made, with universal approval, a Q.C. by Lord Cranworth, and in that year his fees mounted to £3,414. After he took silk his practice advanced by leaps and bounds, as the following figures show: first year, £4,549; second £5,846; third year £7,107; fourth £7,488. During his last year at the Bar his fees were nearly £8,000, a very large pro mercial cases. Of thirty-eight special jury actions at Croydon on his last circuit, he was engaged in no fewer than twenty-nine. Special juries came to know him, and found it difficult to resist Bramwell's pithy, apparently unstudied, talk. "It strikes me," he was wort to say, with uplifted finger and sagacious look; and what struck him, struck them also. Out came a homely sentence, some simple aphorism which might veil a fallacy, but which stuck to the jurymen's minds, and survived the summing-up and the disconcerting babble of the jury-room. With most of the judges he was a favorite, and in particular with that miracle of astuteness, Sir John Jervis, chief justice of the Common Pleas. In referring to Bramwell the chief justice always spoke with admiration of "My learned friend, Mr. Bramwell." With Lord Campbell for some reason he was always coming into collision. Impatient and somewhat despotic in his later years, that judge had acquired a way, as he paced up and down the bench, of dropping during the trial, for the ear of the jury, remarks of a kind which Bramwell resented. On one occasion there was an explosion. In the early stages of a case in which he was the defendant, Lord Campbell had forgotten himself so far as to let fall more than one observation favorable to the plaintiff. When Bramwell's turn to open the defendant's case came, he began in this wise: "Gentlemen of the jury, when a plausible case, supported by plausible evidence, is put before you in a plausible way, by a plausible advocate, you may be pardoned for thinking that there is no answer to it; but that a man"--and here the speaker pointed towards the judge "whose lifetime has been passed in Courts of Justice and the administration of the law, who has been appointed to preside over your deliberations, that his experience may remedy your inexperience, should so far forget himself as to ignore the golden rule 'Hear the other side,' fills me with astonishment and indignation." Campbell, it is only just to add, summed up with perfect impartiality, and the defendant succeeded. any one to do so. But as to the general question, supposing circumstances easy. First, if two people are desperately in love, they are beyond advice or reflection. So, if they fancy they are. But the more common case is, where a man meets various women, feels a little inclination here and ence for one; what had he better do? Cultivate it? Fall in love all he can? or shut himself up in himself? I assume that he has no reason to suppose that he cannot make himself acceptable, and that the object of his penchant is of average amiability, and so forth, or rather of the same rank in these matters as himself, worthy of him, he worthy of her; what's to be done? I believe this question, like all similar generalities on men, national character, etc., incapable of a precise answer. You had better form a specific opinion for each individual. But had I, without knowing my man, to advise him, I should say "Fall in love and marry," for many reasons. While a man is unmarried he can always get married; not SO Mr. Bramwell married early; indeed, there, and finally a decided little preferit must be recorded that he, a master of practical wisdom, married, as his friends thought, imprudently. It is characteristic that he who discussed everything also discussed in his notebooks the question, interesting to all the sons of men, whether marriage is a necessity to a complete life, and that he put both sides with fairness and force. Perhaps in literature are not many franker discussions of the problem than the following. Apropos of his own marriage and that of a friend, he argues with himself the question whether marriage is "really the pretty thing we fancy, neither a pis aller nor a mere object, a thing which, from not having, we want." Why should I doubt?* I've tried. Truly if my case decided the question the answer would be short. It would answer it for another (case) like its own; but how often does it occur? Passion in each, excessive, undoubted in one at least, and returned as well as man can return it by the other. Then I venture to say that we had qualities to like and admire forever in the other. . . . Without an acquaintance, no visiting, no gaiety, all friends and relations quarrelled with, thrown entirely on our own mutual affection, and that very circumstance, combined with poverty -the feeling of having acted imprudently in the worldly (and true) sense of the word, and pride, an honest, stern pride of independence, the resolution to show those friends and relations that our independence was not imprudence-who knows the effect of these things? No; my case is no precedent even for myself. March 20. The part with the* (the passage above quoted) is a blunder. Intending to consider the question generally, I was led by thinking of my own case to do so in a particular point of view only, and that the least favorable one, viz., poverty, and that I would not try again, nor advise e converso. This possibility of change must always prevent that settled feeling which the married man has. It must, as I say, always make one treat "present blessings," which are the true joys of life, as temporary only, and so deprive them of their real value. But, besides this, I believe every man to have a faculty of liking, which is a passion, and, ungratified, a most painful (one) like others. No father, mother, or friend suffices for the appeasing of this-a wife or a child may. However tender one's regard may be for the first-named, it is stern and hard compared with the doating-silly if you will-love you bear a child, or which a few may feel for wife or husband. And even those who cannot feel passionate love must be more intimate friends with wife or husband than any one else. Therefore, I say marry. It will be said, "This is one side of the question only. But think of sickness, death, ill-humor, infidelity, bad, stupid, deformed children turning out ill, hanged, transported, bankrupt, etc.!" I know. All I can say is, I think it worth the risk. Some may say, A low plane of thought! The reflection of others will be, What an antidote to much mawkish literature on this subject; and how much purer and even loftier than senti In 1850 there existed profound dissatisfaction with the working of the Common Law Courts. The system of pleading had become out of harmony with the age. Lawyers were becoming tired of the tyranny of Baron Parke, and beginning to scoff at the wisdom of Meeson and Welsby. There was a general desire to see justice done even at the expense of the record. The jurists who said, "To be sure the man owes the money; but how make up the posteà?" were passing away. Lord Cranworth resolved to set on foot an inquiry into the working of the Common Law Courts, and among the commissioners whom he chose were Mr. Willes, who, after having made a reputation at Trinity College, Dublin, had acquired a large practice, and his friend Mr. Bramwell. Both of them took great pains with their task. They did not confine themselves to the enunciation of general principles; they elaborated the details of the proposed changes; they penned the clauses of a bill to give effect to them. They even visited America one long vacation in order to study on the spot the new procedure of the State of New York. To lawyers of the present day it is not easy to appreciate the effect of the Common Law Procedure Acts, the outcome of this inquiry. A whole world of learning was rendered as use less as the rules of astrology or alchemy; mountains of rubbish were removed; a new spirit pervaded the courts. To judges of the school of Parke and Holroyd, litigation had been very much like a game of cards or chess. There must be perfect fairness. But above all there must be no revoking; and whether a victory was won by tricks or honors mattered not. This, as the history of jurisprudence laws shows, is a stage through which all systems of law pass. Among some savage tribes it is forbidden to mention one's mother-in-law or one's wife's relations. The archaic rules on the subject are as strict as, and not unlike, those in English law relative to misjoinder. The peculiarity of our law was that this technical rigor, characteristic of primitive times, had so long survived. The change brought about by the Common Law Procedure Acts was not accepted with universal satisfaction. There were murmurs which sometimes took a humorous form. Arnould, the Home Circuit laureate, already quoted, wrote some jingling verses entitled "Bramwell, his Dream," in strains a little too Rabelaisian to be cited entirely. A phantom crew of "Demurrers," "Rules to Compel," "Nuncs pro tuncs," and other horrid forms appear, and hurl reproaches at Bramwell as a traitor to his order. Yon great ghost who gloomily flutters- duller wouldst destroy Thou"-and here the din so furious grew, And the grisly host, with such fierce joy In their cruel eyes, at Bramwell flew, That he well-nigh woke. Mr. Bramwell's friend and fellowapcommissioner, Mr. Willes, was pointed a judge in succession to Maule; and in 1856 Bramwell became Parke's successor in the Exchequer. "I am sure I cannot be wrong in appointing you," said Lord Cranworth, in conveying to Bramwell the news; and even that most exacting of critics, Baron Parke himself, was satisfied, for he wrote: "I rejoice much to hear from the chancellor that you are to supply myself on the Exchequer. No appointment could be better. May you sit there, or in a higher place, as long as I have done, or longer. You will find the judicial seat eminently comfortable." Parke thought well of the appointment; so too thought all who knew Mr. Bramwell. perhaps they did not perceive so clearly as is now possible was the significance of the appointment-the fact that the What succession of Bramwell was indicative of a great change coming over English ⚫ law. Of Parke and his influence a word may here be said. For about twentyeight years he had been on the Bench; and he had left his impress on English law as had done no other Common Law nature. single judge since Mansfield-unfortunately reared by Parke to those who would attain the great objects for which courts, law and lawyers exist. His historical learning and that of his still more erudite contemporary, Mr. Justice Willes, were not always of a gründlich character. Their acquaintance with the reports was prodigious. Both of them knew the Year Books, and the manuals and text-writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But of much of that real history of the law of England which scholars such as Professor Maitland are bringing to light -that which is to be found outside textbooks and reports, in early charters, in the proceedings, for the most part, still unprinted, of local courts, in the court rolls, and in the despised "Chronicle law"-they perhaps knew no more than some of their contemporaries; probably less than one of them, Mr. J. W. Smith, the gifted author of the "Leading Cases," who united to indefatigable industry an insight into the true history of England marvellous, considering the materials accessible to him. Professor Vinogradoff, in his work on "Villenage in England," remarks: Facts are brought into a system by Coke, but the system is strictly a legal historical requirements, for it makes the No better example of this tendency to look for the present in the past could be found than in some of Parke's judgments. All of his contemporaries, it must be added, did not overrate him. One who knew him well thus expresses, in a letter to Lord Bramwell, his opinion of the legal autocrat of 1850: Parke was not a great man at all. He was a very considerable one. His intellectual powers were like the explosive compositions called fulminatory - very powerful within a limited space. He was a very kind, but not a generous, man. He gave his sympathy freely; not as the nothing, but because he had really a kind bishop gives a blessing, because it costs heart. . . . The case of Ellen v. Top1 (I think that is the name of the case), about an apprentice, is the best sample I know of Parke and Rolfe, and the triumph of law above common sense in small minds. Parke . . . cited the case of a sale of a West Indian estate with a few slaves wanting, and introduced the doctrine of the objection not going to the whole consideration. Rolfe (cujus in corpore pusillo mens est magis pusilla) turned round and adopted Parke's view. In the mean time, Martin, with his sound law, and, I had Wilde made Rolfe a vice-chancellor, and almost said, if possible sounder sense, came into the court. The case was stated to him by Parke, and was answered by a contemptuous "Pooh! nonsense!" to Parke's great astonishment, and the court was saved from the disgrace of Parke's judgment. He (Parke) never thought a judgment perfect unless it referred expressly to every decided case that in any degree bore on the question. I once asked him what judges and advocates were to do two hundred years hence. His reply was, "They must do the best they can when that time comes. At present I think a solemn judgment should refer to every case." His 1 6 Ex. 424. |