sume his argument. Knight Bruce sat fin ishing a letter; and when it was folded and the envelope addressed, looked up as if in astonishment. "Oh, Mr. Bacon, I owe you many apologies; I was not listen ing; I thought that old lady was talking still." Lord Campbell was the Chancellor then, and used occasionally to sit with the two Lords Justices. I remember coming into the court one day after the great prize fight between Heenan and Sayers. Lord Camp bell was sitting very glum; he had recently lost his wife, and out of respect for his loss Knight Bruce was sparing of his jokes. A very little man, Mr. De Gex, was on his legs. I think it was the appeal of a bankrupt against the disallowance of his certificate, which in those days would have had the effect of giving him, speaking financially, a clean bill of health. Mr. De Gex was pounding away with great vehemence, de nouncing all the delinquencies of the debtor, his faulty book-keeping, his trading long after he knew of his utterly insolvent' cir cumstances, and, finally, the glaring enor mity of his Stock Exchange speculations, which capped the pinnacle. At last, when Mr. De Gex paused for breath, Knight Bruce turned to Lord Campbell : " Ought we not, sitting here as umpires, to ' call time,' my lord?" I was in court when Bethell was sworn in as Lord Chancellor. He and Knight Bruce always disliked each other. Knight Bruce administered the oath with great solemnity, he and Turner and all the bar standing — then Bethell prepared to leave the court, bowing to the bar, and then to the Lords Justices, and Knight Bruce's bow, slow, solemn, sarcastically profound, till he bent nearly double, was a sight never for gotten by those who saw it. Many are the stories told of Bethell. His bitter sarcasm and his self-satisfied vanity made him more enemies than friends. One well-authenticated story of him I have never
seen published. It must have leaked out through one of the juniors in the case. Bethell had to appear on the reference of some academical matter, as to the rights of the Fellows of an Oxford College, and the hearing was to be before the Archbishop of Canterbury (Longley), Lord Wensleydale (I think, or it might have been Sir John Taylor Coleridge) and Dr. Travers Twiss. Bethell came into the consultation room and, without opening his papers, said to the other counsel : " Gentlemen, I really need not trouble you; in my opinion, we are right on every point, legally right, equitably right, academically right, morally right, and I hope to be able to make our case clear to the somewhat heterogeneous tribunal before whom I shall have to bring forward my ar gument. Let us not be too confident, how ever; of whom does that tribunal consist? An effete archbishop, a judge in his dotage, and a simple vacuity." It was a record of the office in which I was working, that the senior partner had sent one of his clerks into Shadwell's Court to ask Bethell what order Shadwell had made on a certain petition. The answer was : "Silly man! he has given me all I asked." In later years, as Lord Westbury, he said of one newly-appointed judge: "With a little more experience he will make posi tively the worst judge on the bench." Poor Bethell; his enemies were many, but his genius was so great that very few were able to get an advantage over him. In those days Sir J. Wickens, the ablest junior, and certainly the ugliest man at the Chancery bar, held the coveted off1ce of counsel to the Treasury in charity matters. Once Bethell thought he would snub Wick ens. It was at a consultation. " I should like to ask you, Mr. Wickens, was the opin ion of any counsel taken before these pro ceedings were commenced in this form? I cannot conceive it possible that any mem ber of the bar should have so completely misconceived his remedy."
