Whichever of these recommendations is right, certainly some great and successful lawyers have been startlingly ignorant men. The English lawyers have, perhaps, had the best talent for not knowing anything outside of their own dry arena. As long ago as when Erasmus visited England, in the days of Henry VIII. and Sir Thomas More, he described the English lawyers as "a most learned species of profoundly ignorant men." And in later times the famous Lord Kenyon had not only an ignorance that would have astounded Erasmus, but a genius for showing it in public altogether without parallel.
But whatever the importance of knowing much or of knowing little, there is no doubt or dispute as to the necessity of talking a good deal. An old fellow once said that the way to be a good lawyer is to read all the morning and talk all the afternoon. Old Serjeant Maynard, before quoted, thought so highly of gab in law that he defined the latter by the former, calling it, in the dog-Latin of his craft, Ars Bablativa, the art babblative. "Soap the judge and butter the jury," was the advice of another lawyer to a new beginner. By thus lubricating his fellow-Englishmen, it is said that Serjeant Bond used to get a verdict in the words, "We finds for Serjeant Bond, and costs." Another old babblatavist said, "Keep talking, and say anything that comes uppermost." The talk should be entertaining too. When a young lawyer asked Lord Eldon what was the best book to carry with him on circuit the giant of jurisprudence answered, "Joe Miller."
Perhaps the two things most characteristic of the lawyer are his wit and his fee. The wit, which is much of it satirical, is the natural spark struck out by incessant collision of hard, edgy minds, and the fee is that for which (in one sense at least) the whole of his work is done. It was a fling as old as the seventeenth century,—a pun based upon the coinage of that period,—that "a lawyer is like Balaam's ass; he cannot speak until he sees the angel." And the same thought in a modern form is to-day circuiting about the United States in a newspaper pun, to the effect that "a lawyer is strongest when he is fee-blest!"" There are many stories about the extortions of lawyers; one of the keenest of them is that of Serjeant Davenport, who was reproached by his brethren for "disgracing the profession" by receiving a fee so small as to be paid in silver. But he answered with weighty and conclusive terseness: "I took silver because I could not get gold; but I took every farthing the fellow had in the world, and I hope you don't call that disgracing the profession!"—The Galaxy.
E MACHINA JUS.
By Leguleius Quidam Acutus, LL.B.
IN the good old days the writing of Latin verses was regarded as the best proof of a genteel education and the highest accomplishment of a public man. It was reasonably thought to require some moderate knowledge of the Latin language and of the laws of prosody, to say nothing of the stock of general knowledge, taste, and fancy that usually if not always went to the task. The graduates of Oxford and Cambridge felt themselves secure here, as in a citadel, against the vulgar herd who pushed their presumptuous way into public life and the House of Commons on no better ground than their party services, or wealth, or perhaps on some vulgar familiarity with commerce or finance, or the upstart science of political economy.
