Read Ebook: The Seven Lamps of Advocacy by Parry Edward Abbott Sir

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"Our friend Tom Jones," he writes, "was a little lengthy sometimes in the exposition of his client's rights, and one day the chief baron said to him, 'Mr. Jones, this case has occupied a great deal of time, and we have a very long list of cases to get through.'

"'My lord,' said Tom, 'I have carefully looked through that list, and I did not find there was a single cause in which I or my client was in the slightest degree interested.'"

But these sallies should never degenerate into mere incivility or abuse, in which there is little real courage, since a judge of sense will always refrain, if it be at all possible, from reply to such attacks, which only injure the reputation of the Bar and destroy the reputation of the advocate.

In the early days of American Sessions a certain judge was violently attacked by a young and very impudent attorney. To the manifest surprise of everybody present, the judge heard him quite through as though unconscious of what was said, and made no reply. After the adjournment of the day, and all had assembled at the inn where the judge and many of the attorneys had their lodgings, one of the company, referring to the scene in court, asked the judge why he did not rebuke the impertinent fellow.

"Permit me," said the judge, loud enough to call the attention of all the company, among whom was the fellow in question--"permit me to tell you a story. My father, when we lived down in the country, had a dog--a mere puppy, I may say. Well, this puppy would go out every moonlight night and bark at the moon for hours together." Here the judge paused, as if he had done with his story.

"Well, what of it?" exclaimed half-a-dozen of the audience at once.

"Oh, nothing, nothing whatever; the moon kept right on, as if nothing had happened."

Independence without moderation becomes licentiousness, but true independence is an essential attribute of advocacy, and the English Bar has never wanted men endowed with this form of true courage. The sacrifice of the highest professional honours to the maintenance of principle has been a commonplace in the history of English advocates, and the names of the living could be added if need be to those who have passed away, leaving us this clean heritage as example.

He then continued, in words which the learned editor of Howell's State Trials emphasises by printing in capital letters, to enunciate one of the basic principles of English advocacy:

Side by side with this may be set the grand example of William Henry Seward in acting in the defence of the negro Freeman in 1846. A horrible murder was committed. Without any provocation or desire for plunder, Freeman killed a farmer and several of his family. He was easily captured, when he laughed in the face of his captors and acknowledged the crime. He was a recently emancipated slave, deaf, and obviously insane. The sheriff had the greatest difficulty in preventing him from being lynched. The clergyman at the victims' funeral made a rousing appeal for his punishment, which was printed and circulated round the district.

Seward undertook his defence, and a storm of prejudice and passion was directed against him to dissuade him from doing what he believed to be his duty as an advocate. In the crowded court-house, when the judge asked, "Will any one defend this man?" and Seward rose, and said he was counsel for the prisoner, a murmur of indignation ran round the court. His advocacy was of no avail to the individual, but his eloquent speech remains a noble statement of the duty of the advocate, and a fine example of devotion and courage in the exercise of that duty.

The whole speech is worthy of study, as it contains a glowing and reasoned appeal for the right of the most degraded human being in a civilised state to a real hearing of his case in a judicial court, which can only be obtained through honest and competent advocacy.

As the yellow harvest-moon rose outside the darkening court-house his peroration was listened to by the indignant crowd with, at least, outward respect, and it remains a message of encouragement to the advocates of future generations.

"In due time, gentlemen of the jury, when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst with those of my kindred and neighbours. It is very possible they may be unhonoured, neglected, spurned! But perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them an humble stone, and thereon this epitaph: 'He was faithful.'"

These words, as he desired, are engraved on the marble over him, and he is remembered at the American Bar as an advocate who upheld its best traditions, and feared not to hold aloft the Lamp of Courage.

THE LAMP OF INDUSTRY

THE LAMP OF INDUSTRY

The first task of the advocate is to learn to labour and to wait. There never was a successful advocate who did not owe some of his prowess to industry. From the biographies of our ancestors we may learn that the eminent successful ones of each generation practiced at least enough industry in their day to preach its virtues to aspiring juniors.

Work soon becomes a habit. It may not be altogether a good habit, but it is better to wear out than to rust out. Nothing, we are told, is impossible to industry. Certainly without industry the armoury of the advocate will lack weapons on the day of battle.

There must be years of what Charles Lamb described with graceful alliteration as "the dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood" before the young advocate can hope to dazzle juries with eloquent perorations, confound dishonest witnesses by skilful cross-examination, and lead the steps of erring judges into the paths of precedent.

All great advocates tell us that they have had either steady habits of industry or grand outbursts of work. Charles Russell had a continuous spate of energy. Many of us can remember him, tireless and active himself, bustling into the robing-room at St. George's Hall, Liverpool, and finding several members of the Junior Bar standing around the fire.

"We have nothing to do," said the Junior Bar.

Abraham Lincoln owed his sound knowledge of law to grim, zealous industry. As a storekeeper he studied Blackstone out of shop-hours, perched on a wood-pile or lying under a tree. On circuit, in the bedroom of the village inn, a candle at his head and his feet protruding over the foot-board of his bed, he lay reading law until two in the morning, undisturbed by snoring comrades. When possible, he would read aloud, for thus, he said, "two senses catch the idea. First, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and can therefore remember it better." In after-life to every student who came near him his advice was, "Work! work! work!"

Advocacy is indeed a life of industry. Each new success brings greater toil. Campbell, writing home from the Oxford Circuit, describes the weary round of his daily task. Some advocates suffer thus every day the court sits, whilst others sit round and suffer envy.

"I ought to have got so far to-night on my way to Hereford, but we have a long day's work before us, and I shall be obliged to travel all to-morrow night. You can hardly form a notion of the life of labour, anxiety, and privation which I lead upon the circuit. I am up every morning by six. I never get out of court till seven, eight, or nine in the evening, and, having swallowed any indifferent fare that my clerk provides for me at my lodgings, I have consultations and read briefs till I fall asleep. This arises very much from the incompetence of the judge. It is from the incompetency of judges that the chief annoyances I have in life arise. I could myself have disposed of the causes here in half the time the judge employed. He has tried two causes in four days. Poor fellow, he is completely knocked up."

An advocate must study his brief in the same way that an actor studies his part. Success in advocacy is not arrived at by intuition. Mr. O'Brien, in his excellent biography of Charles Russell, details an interesting conversation with his hero which enforces this truth. He had raised the question of an advocate succeeding by mere intuition in picking up the threads of a case in court, when Russell interrupted him in a characteristic phrase.

"'That's all nonsense,' he said. 'You don't know anything by intuition. You have to work hard and to think hard. I get some good help, as I tell you. My mode of work is this: One of these young men reads the brief and makes a note--a full one. I go through the note with him' , 'cross-examining him, if you like. Sometimes, I admit, it may not be necessary for me to read the brief; the note may be so complete, and the man's knowledge of the case so exact, that I get everything from him. But it often is--in fact, generally is--necessary to go to the brief. You have seen me reading briefs here. I admit that I am quick in getting at the kernel of a case, and that saves me some trouble; but I must read the brief with my own eyes, or somebody else's.'

"I said, 'Sir John Karslake went blind because he could only read his brief with his own eyes. It is a great point to be able to read your brief with somebody else's eyes!'

"I said, 'It has been said that O'Connell never read his brief when he appeared for the defendant. He made his case out of the plaintiff's case.'

Industry in reading and book-learning may make a man a good jurist, but the advocate must exercise his industry in the double art of speaking and arranging his thoughts in ordered speech. He must be ready to leave his books awhile and practise the athletics of eloquence with equal industry.

For "bare reading without practice pedantiseth a student, but never makes him a clever lawyer." Our fathers understood this better perhaps than we do, and made provision of halls and cloisters and gardens, where students could take exercise and discuss the mysteries of their profession when the hours of reading were over.

Roger North tells us in his life of his brother, the Lord Keeper: "I remember that, after the fire of the Temple, it was considered whether the old cloister walks should be rebuilt or rather improved into chambers; which latter had been for the benefit of the Middle Temple. But in regard it could not be done without the consent of the Inner house, the masters of the Middle house waited upon the then Mr. Attorney Finch, to desire the concurrence of his society upon a proposition of some benefit to be thrown in on that side. But Mr. Attorney would by no means give way to it, and reproved the Middle Templars very wittily and eloquently upon the subject of students walking in evenings there and putting cases, 'which,' he said, 'was done in his time, as mean and low as the buildings were then, however it comes that such a benefit to students is now made so little account of.' And thereupon the cloisters, by the order and disposition of Sir Christopher Wren, were built as they now stand."

The days of wandering in cloisters and gardens, putting cases to one's fellow-students, and listening to the wisdom of elders by the margin of the fountain are, alas! not for us. But even to-day a wise youngster should recognise that sitting in court to listen to the conduct of cases, attendance at circuit mess and dining in Hall, where the law-talk of seniors may still on occasion be of value--these things are all forms of industry, for the advocate can only learn the true creed of his faith from oral tradition.

In recent years we have wisely revived the old moots which date back to early days when the Inns of Court were really schools of law. Dugdale thus describes the ancient ceremony of the moot: "The pleadings are first recited by the students, then the case heard and argued by the barristers; and lastly by the reader elect and benchers, who all three argue in English; but the pleadings are recited, and the case argued by the utter barristers, in law French. The moot being ended, all parties return to the cupboard, where the mootmen present the benchers with a cup of beer and a slice of bread."

And not only are these more social forms of industry good in themselves, but they are the only antidote to that despondency and dread of failure which cloud the brightest and most hopeful mind in the long days of apprenticeship. Even the greatest advocates have suffered such moments. Had John Scott yielded to his own sinking inclinations, he might have been a provincial barrister at Newcastle instead of Lord Chancellor; Kenyon nearly became a Welsh parson instead of Chief Justice of England; and Russell tells us that in our own day Gully nearly exiled himself to the Straits Settlements, and Herschell proposed to emigrate to the Indian Bar.

A learned County Court judge, in dealing with the unfortunate bankruptcy of a brother-barrister, expressed the opinion that for a man to come to the Bar without private means, or, at least, expectations from a maiden aunt, was "a rash and hazardous speculation." His dictum was unsound in law and history. Some of the greatest advocates began life as poor men. And though men of wealth have succeeded in advocacy, yet poverty is a true friend to industry. "Parts and poverty," said Lord Chancellor Talbot, "are the only things needed by the law student."

Kenyon, when asked by a fashionable lady how her son might best prepare for success at the Bar, said: "Let him spend all his money, marry a rich wife, spend all hers, and when he has got not a shilling in the world, let him attack the law." For a lawyer, as an old pleader said, must be prepared in his early days "to eat sawdust without butter," or, as Lord Eldon put it, "to live like a hermit and work like a horse."

If a man is endowed with health and industry, the profession of an advocate is not "a rash and hazardous speculation." He may even without blame give hostages to fortune, remembering that when Erskine made his first appearance at the Bar his agitation nearly overcame him, and he was just about to sit down a failure when, he says, "I thought I felt my little children tugging at my gown, and the idea roused me to an exertion of which I did not think myself capable." He succeeded, indeed, far beyond his expectations, and he found, when he had overcome that first modest inertia which benumbs even the greatest genius, that he was fully equipped to fight the battles of his clients against all comers. And the reason of it was that he had not failed to read and learn and digest beneath the Lamp of Industry.

THE LAMP OF WIT

THE LAMP OF WIT

At the back of this little word "wit" lies the idea of knowledge, understanding, sense. In its manifestation we look for a keen perception of some incongruity of the moment. The murky atmosphere of the court is illuminated by a flash of thought, quick, happy, and even amusing. Wit, wisely used, bridges over a difficulty, smooths away annoyance, or perhaps turns aside anger, dissolving embarrassment in a second's laughter.

Nor can "," a derogatory parenthesis unknown in the official law reports, be wholly condemned among human men. "How much lies in laughter, the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man!" Laughter may be derisive, unkind, even cruel, or it may be rightly used as a just weapon of ridicule wherewith to smite pretension and humbug. It may be gracious and full of kindliness, putting a timid man at his ease, or instinct with good-humour, softening wrath or mitigating tedious irrelevancy. It may be the due recognition of a witty text preaching a useful truth, that could otherwise be expressed only in a treatise; as when Common Law said unto Chancery, "Truth will leak out even in an affidavit;" or when Erskine replied to Kenyon, who suggested that he should apply to Chancery for relief, "Would your lordship send a dog you loved there?"

From the earliest times wit has been a light to lighten the darkness of advocacy. Cicero was noted for the jests and repartees which punctuated his forensic speeches, and these were held "not foreign to the business of the forum." Yet, like many a man of wit, he stumbled on occasion through the temptation of the gift, and offended some with malevolent sayings, as Bethell and others have done in our own time. It is easy to forget the poet's warning about "the medium in all things."

Pedants and bores resent all forms of wit, but a real humorist rejoices in nothing so much as a good story against himself. Rufus Choate was a man of great eloquence and abounding vocabulary, but he had a true sense of wit. No one enjoyed better the remark of Mr. Justice Wilde, a dry, precise judge who, out of court, on occasion allowed his wit expression. He was asked by a junior if he had not heard that Mr. Worcester had just published a new edition of his dictionary with a great number of additional words. Gripping his young friend's arm, he said in a perturbed whisper, "No, I had not heard of it. But, for God's sake, don't tell Choate!"

Often the wit of an advocate will turn a judge from an unwise course where argument or rhetoric would certainly fail. Lord Mansfield paid little attention to religious holidays. He would sit on Ash-Wednesday, to the scandal of some members of the Bar, whose protests made no impression upon him. At the end of Lent he suggested that the court might sit on Good Friday. The members of the Bar were horrified. Serjeant Davy, who was in the case, bowed in acceptance of the proposition. "If your lordship pleases; but your lordship will be the first judge that has done so since Pontius Pilate." The court adjourned until Saturday.

But the learned Serjeant "Bull Davy," as he was called on circuit, could never pass a jest, even at the expense of his client. He was defending a criminal against whom the prosecution had opened a very strong case.

"Who is concerned for the prisoner?"

"My lord," replied Davy, rising with grave solemnity, "I am concerned for him, and very much concerned, after what I have heard."

Wit is often the fittest instrument with which to destroy the bubble of bombast. When Curran, in an outburst of histrionic anger, placed his hand upon his heart, saying, "I am the trusty guardian of my own honour," it was Sir Boyle Roche who spoiled the episode by rising with much friendliness to say, "I congratulate my honourable friend on the snug little sinecure to which he has appointed himself."

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