No one ever encountered a harsh word from Baron Cleasby, when he was on the Bench, except that he had a way of sternly rebuking prisoners for the enormity of their crimes and finishing with a ridiculously small sentence. " You are one of the worst men I ever tried," Cleasby would say, " and the sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned one month." — Bench and Bar. "Mr. Robinson," said counsel, " you say that you once officiated in a pulpit. Do you mean that you preached?" "No, sir; I held the candle for the man who did." "Ah! the Court understood you differently; they supposed that the discourse came from you." "No, sir, I only throwed a light on it." "Gentlemen of the jury," said an Irish barrister, "it will be for you to say whether this defendant shall be allowed to come into court with unblush ing footsteps, with the cloak of hypocrisy in his mouth, and draw three bullocks out of my client's pocket with impunity."
An undoubted alibi was some time ago success fully proved in an American court, as follows : — "And you say that you are innocent of stealing this rooster from Mr. Jones? " queried the judge. "Yes, sir; I am innocent, — as innocent as a child." "You are confident you did not steal the rooster from Mr. Jones?" "Yes, sir, and I can prove it" "How can you prove it?" "I can prove that I did n't steal Mr. Jones's rooster, Judge, because I stole two hens from Mr. Graston same night, and Jones lives five miles from Graston's." "The proof is conclusive," said the judge; " dis charge the prisoner." Not unlikely. Lawyer. Do you swear positively, sir, that you know more than half this jury?" Witness. Yes, sir; and now that I have taken a good look at 'em, I 'll swear that I know more than all of 'em put together. — Puck.
505 NOTES.
In the current advertisement of a famous legal treatise it is stated that the present edition contains citations offive thousand cases in addition to those supplied by the original author and by a former editor. In another five years the number will doubdess reach ten thousand. What, the lay mind wonders, will be the ultimate result? The lawyer of the twentieth century will probably be a gnome, invisible to the eye, but burrowing indus triously beneath the huge volumes that are piled upon him, and communicating with the court by means of a telephone. — Boston Post.
As with many other great judges, law was all in all to Baron Parke. " I wonder," said a lady to him shortly before his death, " that with your great mind, Baron, you have never written anything." "Written anything! " was the astonished answer; "why, my dear madam, I have written the judg ments in the volumes of 'Meeson & Welsby,' and they will remain long after the perishable literature of the present time has passed away."
England has made great strides forward in her civil jurisprudence during the last fifty years. The sponge of legislative enactment has wiped out so much of her common-law procedure that Tidd's Practice and Buller's Nisi Prius, those vade mecums of the olden time, are of but little more use in her civil courts of to-day than they would be in. those of France or Germany. It is not so, however, with her criminal courts. There the common law — " the bloody old beast," as Pennsylvania's great jurist, Judge Jeremiah Black, more forcibly than elegantly styled it — continues to shock the civilization of the age. Parliament, with that in difference to the cries of justice which has always characterized the English law-maker wherever human lives and not pounds and pence are in volved, has paid but little attention to reforms in criminal procedure. As a consequence English homicide trials are to-day frequently the same travesty upon justice that they were a century ago. A man in England on trial for his life may now, it is true, have the right of counsel, and may crossexamine the witnesses who testify against him; but that is about the only improvement. The right to testify in his own behalf is still denied him; and
