LONDON LEGAL LETTER. London, February 10, 1894. GRAYS Inn Chapel, which has been closed for some time for the purpose of restora tion, was reopened the other Sunday. A large congregation of barristers and their friends as sembled in honor of the occasion, when the Bishop of Marlborough preached an appropriate sermon, sketching the history of the little shrine from whose pulpit Laud and Whitgift have held forth, but whither now-a-days a scanty company comes to worship on the first day of the week. The rumor of Mr. Gladstone's approaching resignation, which was circulated last week, sent a thrill of excitement through the ranks of the profession. Conservative lawyers held their heads higher, and the adherents of the present adminis tration whose claims to promotion have not as yet been discovered or gratified, were propor tionately downcast : however, Mr. Gladstone would appear to have no immediate intention of leaving the helm. In one of my recent letters I referred to the opportunities of practice afforded by the law of local government in its various branches; before Mr. Justice Wright became a judge he enjoyed a practical monopoly of this lucrative kind of work; he was standing counsel for almost every municipality in the kingdom, and made an enormous income : no one has as yet taken his place; we have of course one or two excellent local government lawyers, but their practices as compared with the one Mr. Justice Wright enjoyed are quite inconsiderable. Lord Halsbury, the late Lord Chancellor, took the place of the Master of the Rolls in the Court of Appeal at the commencement of the sittings. Lord Esher had a severe illness from which, happily, he has now recovered to the satisfaction of the profession and the litigating public. I^rd Esher is not only a great lawyer and a great judge, he possesses a very striking personality,
and seldom fails to diffuse some humor around the dreariest details. A number of the leaders of the Irish Bar have recently joined our ranks in the Temple, in some instances purely for the purposes of prestige, but one or two aspire to make a name in London as well as in Dublin. The most prominent by far of these Anglo-Irish barristers is Mr. Edward Carson, Q. C.; he was Solicitor General for Ireland under the late government, and gained high official distinction by his strenuous and successful conduct of gov ernment prosecutions; last year he joined the Middle Temple and has been doing fairly well in the English Courts since then; he only ranks as a junior in London. He made one speech in Parliament in the Home Rule debate, which won for him great fame, but his subsequent appear ances in the House of Commons have not been remarkable. I rather think that he would have better consulted his material interests by adher ing to the Four Courts across the Channel. Mr. Carson is not an orator, but he is a strong, cap able party speaker. Lincoln's Inn has made itself notorious by introducing, on special occasions, the system of table d'hote dinners, instead of the venerable English meat, still in use on ordinary days, and which still reigns in undisturbed majesty in the other Inns. We dine in messes of four, each mess receiving a tureen of soup, or a dish of fish, a joint, a pudding, and cheese. The Benchers of Lincoln's Inn have once and again taken a plebiscite of the members on the ques tion of substituting a table d'hote dinner for the old system, but an enormous majority of votes has always defeated the sacrilegious proposal. However, on Grand Day in each term, the au thorities have arbitrarily imposed the new plan, and apart from prejudice, I think most people prefer the change.
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