The Experiences Of A Barrister, And Confessions Of An Attorney

THE EXPERIENCES OF A BARRISTER,

Confessions of an Attorney. 1880...

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CONFESSIONS OF AN ATTORNEY. THE MARCH ASSIZE.

Something more than half a century ago, a person, in going along Holborn, might have seen, near the corner of one of the thoroughfares which diverge towards Russell Square, the respectable-looking shop of a glover and haberdasher named James Harvey, a man generally esteemed by his neighbors, and who was usually considered well to do in the world. Like many London tradesmen, Harvey was originally from the country. He had come up to town when a poor lad, to push his fortune, and by dint of steadin

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THE NORTHERN CIRCUIT.

About the commencement of the present century there stood, near the centre of a rather extensive hamlet, not many miles distant from a northern seaport town, a large, substantially-built, but somewhat straggling building, known as Craig Farm (popularly Crook Farm) House. The farm consisted of about one hundred acres of tolerable arable and meadow land; and at the time I have indicated, belonged to a farmer of the name of Armstrong. He had purchased it about three years previously, at a sale held

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THE CONTESTED MARRIAGE.

I had just escaped to my chambers one winter afternoon from a heavy trial "at bar" in the King's Bench, Westminster, and was poring over a case upon which an "opinion" was urgently solicited, when my clerk entered with a letter which he had been requested to deliver by a lady, who had called twice before during the day for the purpose of seeing me. Vexed at the interruption, I almost snatched the letter from the man's hand, hastily broke the seal, and to my great surprise found it was from my ex

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THE MOTHER AND SON.

Dinner had been over about half an hour one Sunday afternoon.—the only day on which for years I had been able to enjoy a dinner—and I was leisurely sipping a glass of wine, when a carriage drove rapidly up to the door, a loud rat-tat followed, and my friend Dr. Curteis, to my great surprise, was announced. "I have called," said the doctor as we shook hands, "to ask you to accompany me to Mount Place. I have just received a hurried note from Miss Armitage, stating that her mother, after a very br

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"THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS."

In the month of February of the year following that which witnessed the successful establishment of the claim of Sir Harry Compton's infant son to his magnificent patrimony, Mr. Samuel Ferret was traveling post with all the speed he could command towards Lancashire, in compliance with a summons from Lady Compton, requesting, in urgent terms, his immediate presence at the castle. It was wild and bitter weather, and the roads were in many places rendered dangerous, and almost impassable, by the dr

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ESTHER MASON.

About forty years ago, Jabez Woodford, a foreman of shipwrights in the Plymouth dockyard, whilst carelessly crossing one of the transverse beams of a seventy-four gun-ship, building in that arsenal, missed his footing, fell to the bottom of the hold of the huge vessel, and was killed on the spot. He left a widow and one child—a boy seven years of age, of placid, endearing disposition, but weak intellect—almost in a state of destitution. He had been a coarse-tempered, improvident man; and like to

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THE MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT

"It is really time that a properly-qualified governess had charge of those girls," observed my wife, as Mary and Kate after a more than usually boisterous romp with their papa, left the room for bed. I may here remark, inter alia , that I once surprised a dignified and highly-distinguished judge at a game of blindman's buff with his children, and very heartily he appeared to enjoy it too. "It is really time that a properly-qualified governess had charge of those girls. Susan May did very well as

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THE SECOND MARRIAGE.

A busy day in the assize court at Chester, chequered, as usual, by alternate victory and defeat, had just terminated, and I was walking briskly forth, when an attorney of rather low caste in his profession—being principally employed as an intermediary between needy felons and the counsel practising in the Crown Court—accosted me, and presented a brief; at the same time tendering the fee of two guineas marked upon it. "I am engaged to-morrow, Mr. Barnes," I exclaimed a little testily, "on the civ

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CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.

In the second year of my connection with the Northern Circuit, when even junior briefs were much less numerous than acceptable, I was agreeably surprised, as I sat musing on the evening of my arrival in the ancient city of York upon the capricious mode in which those powerful personages the attorneys distributed their valuable favors, by the entrance of one of the most eminent of the race practising in that part of the country, and the forthwith tender of a bulky brief in the Crown Court, on whi

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"THE ACCOMMODATION BILL."

Such of the incidents of the following narrative as did not fall within my own personal observation, were communicated to me by the late Mr. Ralph Symonds, and the dying confessions of James Hornby, one of the persons killed by the falling in of the iron roof of the Brunswick Theatre. A conversation the other day with a son of Mr. Symonds, who has been long settled in London, recalled the entire chain of circumstances to my memory with all the vivid distinctness of a first impression. One evenin

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THE REFUGEE.

The events which I am about to relate occurred towards the close of the last century, some time before I was called to the bar, and do not therefore in strictness fall within my own experiences as a barrister. Still, as they came to my knowledge with much greater completeness than if I had been only professionally engaged to assist in the catastrophe of the drama through which they are evolved, and, as I conceive, throw a strong light upon the practical working of our criminal jurisprudence, a b

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EXPERIENCES OF A BARRISTER. THE LIFE POLICY.

Besides being the confidential advisers, attorneys are the "confessors" of modern England; and the revelations—delicate, serious, not unfrequently involving life as well as fortune and character—confided to the purchased fidelity and professional honor of men whom romancers of all ages have stereotyped as the ghouls and vampires of civilized society, are, it is impossible to deny, as rarely divulged as those which the penitents of the Greek and Latin churches impart to their spiritual guides and

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BIGAMY OR NO BIGAMY?

The firm of Flint and Sharp enjoyed, whether deservedly or not, when I was connected with it, as it still does, a high reputation for keen practice and shrewd business-management. This kind of professional fame is usually far more profitable than the drum-and-trumpet variety of the same article; or at least we found it so; and often, from blush of morn to far later than dewy eve—which natural phenomena, by the way, were only emblematically observed by me during thirty busy years in the extinguis

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JANE ECCLES

The criminal business of the office was, during the first three or four years of our partnership, entirely superintended by Mr. Flint; he being more an fait , from early practice, than myself in the art and mystery of prosecuting and defending felons, and I was thus happily relieved of duties which, in the days when George III. was king, were frequently very oppressive and revolting. The criminal practitioner dwelt in an atmosphere tainted alike with cruelty and crime, and pulsating alternately

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"EVERY MAN HIS OWN LAWYER."

A smarter trader, a keener appreciator of the tendencies to a rise or fall in colonial produce—sugars more especially—than John Linden, of Mincing Lane, it would have been difficult to point out in the wide city of London. He was not so immensely rich as many others engaged in the same merchant-traffic as himself; nothing at all like it, indeed, for I doubt that he could at any time have been esteemed worth more than from eighty to ninety thousand pounds; but his transactions, although limited i

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THE CHEST OF DRAWERS.

I am about to relate a rather curious piece of domestic history, some of the incidents of which, revealed at the time of their occurrence in contemporary law reports, may be in the remembrance of many readers. It took place in one of the midland counties, and at a place which I shall call Watley; the names of the chief actors who figured in it must also, to spare their modesty of their blushes, as the case may be, be changed; and should one of those persons, spite of these precautions, apprehend

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THE PUZZLE.

Tempus fugit! The space of but a few brief yesterdays seems to have passed since the occurrence of the following out-of-the-way incidents—out-of-the-way, even in our profession, fertile as it is in startling experiences; and yet the faithful and unerring tell-tale and monitor, Anno Domini 1851, instructs me that a quarter of a century has nearly slipped by since the first scene in the complicated play of circumstances opened upon me. The date I remember well, for the Tower-guns had been proclaim

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THE ONE BLACK SPOT.

On the evening of a bleak, cold March day, in an early year of this century, a woman, scantily clad, led a boy about eight years old, along the high-road towards the old city of Exeter. They crept close to the hedge-side to shelter themselves from the clouds of dust, which the sudden gusts of east wind blew in their faces. They had walked many miles, and the boy limped painfully. He often looked up anxiously into his mother's face, and asked if they had much farther to go? She scarcely appeared

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THE GENTLEMAN BEGGAR.

One morning, about five years ago, I called by appointment on Mr. John Balance, the fashionable pawnbroker, to accompany him to Liverpool, in pursuit of a Levanting customer—for Balance, in addition to pawning, does a little business in the sixty per cent. line. It rained in torrents when the cab stopped at the passage which leads past the pawning-boxes to his private door. The cabman rang twice, and at length Balance appeared, looming through the mist and rain in the entry, illuminated by his p

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A FASHIONABLE FORGER.

I am an attorney and a bill-discounter. As it is my vocation to lend money at high interest to extravagant people, my connection principally lies among "fools," sometimes among rogues "of quality." Mine is a pursuit which a prejudiced world either holds in sovereign contempt, or visits with envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; but to my mind, there are many callings, with finer names, that are no better. It gives me two things which I love—money and power; but I cannot deny that it brings wit

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THE YOUNG ADVOCATE.

Antoine de Chaulieu was the son of a poor gentleman of Normandy, with a long genealogy, a short rent-roll, and a large family. Jacques Rollet was the son of a brewer, who did not know who his grandfather was; but he had a long purse and only two children. As these youths flourished in the early days of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and were near neighbors, they naturally hated each other. Their enmity commenced at school, where the delicate and refined De Chaulieu, being the only gentilhomm

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A MURDER IN THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES.

There is, perhaps, no country or climate more beautiful than England, as seen in one of its rural landscapes, when the sun has just risen upon a cloudless summer's dawn. The very feeling that the delightful freshness of the moment will not be entirely destroyed during the whole day, renders the prospect more agreeable than the anticipated fiery advance of the sun in southern or tropical lands. Exhilaration and gladness are the marked characteristics of an English summer morning. So it ever is, a

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