sions to get rid of the taxes. We feel no individual malevolence nor envy toward Mr. Towns, but really his example ought not to be emulated. Perhaps he is not indictable in law; perhaps his flights are not technically contempt of court, although they are plainly in contempt of the muses; but the courts ought somehow to discourage him, say by limiting his time for argument. When the writer of these lines was a boy, his father laid down the rule that he must not read more than one page of poetry to ten of prose. Let the court give Mirabeau Lamartine Towns, Esq., one-tenth of the ordinary time for pro saic summing-up, say six minutes instead of sixty. Justice should be tempered with mercy, not only for those accused of crime, but for the jury.
scholarly men who ever administered justice in any tribu nal.' On these few notes the changes are unceasingly rung. How a sensible and imaginative people, with the names of John Marshall and Kent and Story on their judicial roll-call, can tolerate fustian of this kind we do not stay to inquire. Hut our friends on the other side of the Atlantic have long passed out of that stage in their con stitutional development when they were disposed to deem every criticism an affront. They have absolved the memory of Charles Dickens for the wrong that he did them in ' Martin Chuzzlewit.' They forgave Lord Coleridge his gentle irony at the expense of their national self-conscious ness. They have taken in good part Mr. Bryce's attacks upon Bossdom. And they will certainly profit by the object-lesson — none the less forcible because it is indirect and unavowed — which Lord Russell's article is fitted to give them on the spirit in which legal biography should be written."
Legal Biography. — In some recent remarks in this Easy Chair on legal biography a little gentle fun was made at the propensity of writers on lawyers and judges in this country to spread the color thick, to make the geese all swans, to pat our legal men on the back to that extent that it is apt to hump them up, so to speak. Now the goose is a much more useful bird, dead or alive, than the swan, and it would be ill to turn all the plain but useful geese into useless although ornamental swans. We al luded in no unkind spirit, and with no intention of being offensive, to the propensity of some writers to overwork the laudatory adjectives in such biography. That we are not peculiar in this view is evidenced by the following extract from the London "Saturday Review" in respect to Lord Russell's recent bio graphical sketch of Lord Coleridge, in the "North American Review " : —
Elliott's " General Practice." — Many of our readers will remember with pleasure Judge Byron K. Elliott's treatise entitled " The Work of the Advo cate," a pleasing and profitable law-book which had, or at least needed, no citations of authorities. That learned lawyer and scholar, with the assistance of his son, William F. Elliott, has now taken that work as a basis, and enlarged it to a more technical and practical form, in two portly and comely volumes, from the house of the Bowen-Merrill Company, of Indianapolis, so that it fully answers its description of " a thorough and practical treatise on the prepara tion and trial of causes, containing rules and sugges tions for the work of the advocate in the preparation for trial, conduct of the trial, and preparation for appeal," and is really "new in conception and in execution in the literature of the law." The wisdom, wide reading and scholarly charm of the elder book are retained. The chapter on Theories is alone of sufficient value to justify its publication as a mono graph. Never before have we found references in a law book to such authorities as Tennyson, Bunyan, Donovan, Montaigne, Holmes, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dr. Watts, Southey, De Quincey, Goethe, Hooker, and Boyd, the "Country Parson." These have been fortified by, but not buried under references to law cases forming a table of two hundred and fifty-six pages, which we prob ably owe to the industry of the younger author. Whatever is in the book is made conveniently acces sible by tables of contents covering forty-six pages, and an index extending to two hundred and six. There is nothing simply local in these pages, nor ephemeral. One might almost say that it is a prac tice book "not of an age but for all time," because it is to so great an extent founded on and addressed to the consideration of principles. It was a happy thought of the authors to make the broad wisdom
"The temptation to indulgence in vague and indis criminate laudation of persons alike, but not equally, worthy of praise is not far from any one of us, and it has seized the American public — whom Lord Russell primarily ad dresses — with an almost demoniacal possession. It is, perhaps, in the region of legal memoirs that the ravages of this disease have been worst. To an insatiable desire to read the lives of the members of their numerous and everchanging judiciary, our American neighbours appear to unite a determination that the lives of those worthies shall be written in a manner adequately reflecting the greatness of their institutions. Neither in quantity nor in quality has the supply fallen short of the demand. Every month there is a fresh and full consignment of judicial sketches to meet the popular taste. Short delivery is unknown. Nor is any portion of the cargo ever vitiated by want of conformity to order. The producers of this perennial literature are ob livious to all varieties of mental calibre or differences of level. E:ach member of the American Bench, National or State, is either 'the brightest and most enduring light in the legal constellation,' or ' intellectually the peer of any jurist in the world,' or ' one of the most learned and
