6io
The - Green Bag.
for five years, had to be withdrawn. It was stated that the Western MorningNews two years ago had favourably criticised the play, and that the plaintiff's receipts on that occasion were .£202 for a six-nights' run, whereas on the second occasion he took only;£u8. That, of course, might be the experience of almost any play; the plot and dialogue, for instance, might very well have gone out of fashion after five years. There was no serious attempt made, so far as it is possible to see, to prove that in some respects the play was not vulgar. Nor was it alleged that the libel was malicious; it was merely pleaded that the critic's verdict — which, at all events in regard to the quotations from the play read in court, was amply justified — had affected the plaintiff's takings. Whereupon the jury found for the plaintiff damages .£100. — The Spectator. An interesting article might be written on the mottoes, or "posies," as they were called, of Serjeants' rings — interesting because there, in the favourite maxim of each great lawyer, we get at the dominant principle which inspired his career, the mainspring of his activities. A J)co rex, a rege lex, was the appropriate choice of the time-serving Jeffreys; Sat cito si sat bene-—
how well it sums up Lord Eldon, and Tenax
Justitia: Lord Justice Lush 1 Blackstone's chosen motto was Secundis dubiisque rectus, and it was equally characteristic of him. In the lectureroom, as on the Bench, he was strict, punctual, punctilious; and what he was himself, that he expected others to be. — The Law Journal. If one part of Newgate has a more gruesome interest than another, says the London Globe, it is the iron door in the Old Bailey, outside which, before public executions were abolished in mur der cases thirty-four years ago, prisoners, upon whom sentence of death had been passed, were executed in full view of a disorderly crowd. The last prisoner to pay the extreme penalty of the law in this barbarous fashion was Michael Barrett, who was executed for complicity in the Clerkenwell explosion in 1868. Extraordinary precautions were taken against any further Fenian outrage while Barrett and his fellow criminals were in Newgate, a picked body of police, armed with cutlasses and revolvers,
guarding the outer walls night and day. The large crowds which gathered at nightfall in the Old Bailey whenever an execution was to take place contained the very dregs of London life. On one occasion over thirty thieves were cap tured within sight of the gallows. But there were people in a better station of life who found a brutal pleasure in witnessing these revolting scenes. As much as ^10 was paid for the windows of a shop opposite the prison when Muller was executed for murdering Mr. Briggs on the North London Railway. The late Mr. Michael McCartan had a fine store of anecdote resulting from his experiences as a solicitor in county Down. On one occasion he was defending a man named M'Gladdery at petty sessions, who was charged by the police with owning a dog for which he had no licence. The evidence was as clear as daylight, and the justices had no option but to impose a fine. Just as they were announcing their intention of doing so, a man rose up in the body of the court — a rough-looking customer with a hairy rabbitskin cap in his hand and the usual red muffler round his neck — and said: " Yir 'Anner, yir finin' the wrong man entirely. That dog be longs to my brother-in-law, and this man that yir finin' is my father-in-law. But rather than inform on the husband iv my only sister, I'll pay the fine myself." He then put his hand in his pocket with a great show of eagerness. The justices called him into the witness-box and ex amined him; but he stuck tenaciously to the story that the man in the dock was his father-inlaw and that the owner of the dog was his brother-in-law. The justices were so impressed by the man's earnestness and apparent candour that they changed their minds and inflicted no fine on M'Gladdery. After the case was over, Mr. McCartan, who had witnessed the unex pected episode in a state of amazement, asked his client, M'Gladdery, privately, what was the real meaning of the witness's evidence. " Well, ye see, sir," said M'Gladdery, "the man wuz tellin' the honest truth. About five years ago he married my daughter; so I'm his father-inlaw, true enough. Last year my poor wife died, and in October last I wuz married a second time —to his sister: so ye see I'm his brother-in-law as well. That's God's truth, sir." The Law Times.
