certain than "law." But doubtless some of the lawyers themselves have said things to justify the popular objections to law and equity. Lord Kenyon once said that a client of Erskine's must go into chancery for a remedy; on which the great lawyer, with a voice and manner full of ridiculous pretence of pathos, said, "Would your lordship send a dog that you loved there?"
This distaste for what may be called feeding out of their own dish has been often otherwise shown by lawyers. When Dunning found that his gardener had been threatening with a prosecution some one who had been tramping over the grounds, "You shall prosecute him yourself, John," he said; "he may walk there until the judgment day before I go to law with him." And the famous old Serjeant Maynard said that if a man should come and demand his coat on pain of a lawsuit if it was refused, he would give him the coat at once. And yet in order to have the picking for themselves of whatever bones there are, the shrewd Themists have set afloat for a scarecrow the proverb, "He that is his own lawyer has a fool for a client;" and in some cases avowedly they have hidden their learning and their proceedings in a mysterious veil of "strange jargoning." Old Hargrave, the conveyancer, for instance, bluntly said, "Any lawyer who writes so clearly as to be intelligible is an enemy to his profession." As if on this principle, the hideous "law French" of the Norman days was kept up in the English courts until human nature could endure it no longer. This law French was a diabolical mixture of English, French, and Latin, jumbled together into a mess awful beyond description. Here is an extract from a charge to a grand jury by Sir George Croke in the seventeenth century. In this the knight uses no Latin, but makes a very good piece of lingo with French and English only. He observed, "Car jeo dye pur leur amendment, ils seant semblable als vipers laboring pur eat out the bowels del terre which brings them forth."
The instinct for fighting and quarrelling which the phrenologists call combativeness, and which is one of the most powerful and universal instincts of men, and beasts too, has been the great ally of the legal profession. It has withstood alike the ceaseless drain of the lawyer's bill, and the slow tortures of the delays of justice, sometimes for many generations. An English chancery suit about some land, between the heirs of Viscount Lisle and those of Lord Berkeley, was begun under Edward IV., and remained in court one hundred and ninety years. It was never decided, after all, but was taken out of court by a compromise. Two free and independent Britons, named Narty and Duncan, some time ago spent over ten thousand dollars in a chancery suit to decide which should paint a certain board and whitewash a certain sign. In New York State, not many years since, there was a suit on a note for $25, which was in court three years. The maker had eventually to pay the note and interest and eight hundred dollars' costs beside.
Law modifies lawyers. Many handicrafts distort or exaggerate some part of the body; the like happens even in the fine arts. There is undoubtedly a strong tendency in the profession of the law by itself to render its too exclusive votary dry-minded, ignorant, narrow, pert, and sophistical; a word-catcher, a quibbler, and incapable of considering both sides of any question so as to form a judicial decision upon it. This is so true that it has come to be a saying that the best lawyers do not necessarily make the best judges. It must be so. It is impossible for a man to spend his whole life in arguing one side of a question and slighting the other, and yet retain the full faculty of weighing justly both sides. Sir William Jones said, "Law requires the whole man, and admits of no concurrent pursuits." But Chitty, on the other hand, recommends enough "concurrent pursuits" to make up for this exclusion. Chitty remarks that the young lawyer had better "fill up his leisure" with studying "anatomy, physiology, pathology, surgery, chemistry, medical jurisprudence, and police."
