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The Green Bag
own consent, can he commit himself for contempt of his own Court? And if he commit himself for contempt of his own Court, can he appear by counsel before himself to move for arrest of his own judgment? Ah, my lords, it is indeed painful to have to sit upon a
Woolsack which is stuffed with such thorns as these.’ “Upon the Bench itself Sir William Gilbert seldom allows his satire to play, though Ko-Ko, in ‘The Mikado,‘ in
daughter,‘ who might ‘very well pass for forty-three.’ In the dusk with a light behind her and the rich attorney, faithful if ungallant, promised that he should ‘reap the reward of his pluck’: — The rich attorney was good as his word,
The briefs came trooping gaily, And every day my voice was heard At the sessions or Ancient Bailey. All thieves who could my fees afford Relied on my orations, And many a burglar I've restored To his friends and his relations.
cludes in his famous list of social oflenders who never will be missed,
‘That Nisi Prius nuisance, who just now is rather rife, the Judicial Humorist.’ The judges of the Savoy operas are much given to indulging in reminiscences of their forensic days, and Sir William Gilbert is accustomed to make the Bench the vehicle of his satire on the Bar. It is, for instance, the Lord Chancellor, in ‘Iolanthe,’ who recalls the ‘new and original plan’ on which,
‘when he went to the Bar as a very young man,’ he determined to work: — Ere I go into Court I will read my brief through (Said I to myself, said I), And I'll never take work I'm unable to do (Said I to myself, said I). My learned profession I'll never disgrace By taking a fee with a grin on my face, When I haven't been there to attend to the case (Said I to myself, said I).
“Even the judge in ‘Trial by Jury’ — one of the most delightfully whimsiml of the Gilbertian plays —-is mainly concerned to show how he reached the bench. Somebody once observed that one of three things was essential to a barrister’s success— he must choose an attorney for his father, or marry an
attorney's daughter, or be a miracle. It is the second of these things of which Sir William Gilbert chose to make fun.
The judge in ‘Trial by Jury’ fell in love with ‘a rich attorney's elderly, ugly
"Apart from the counsel in ‘Trial by Jury,’ who do not take a conspicuous part in the amusing proceedings, ‘Sir Bailey Barre, K.C., M.P.,' in ‘Utopia,’ is the only member of Sir William
Gilbert's branch of the profession who appears in his plays, and even here it
is not the honorable and learned gentle man himself who says most of the satirical things of the Bar. It is Princess Zara who makes this interesting con tribution to the ethics of advocacy: — A complicated gentleman allow me to present, Of all the arts and faculties the terse embodiment, He's a great Arithmetician who can demonstrate with ease That two and two are three, or five, or anything you please; An eminent Logician who can make it clear to you That black is white — when looked at from the proper point of view; A marvelous Philologist who'll undertake to show That ‘Yes' is but another and a neater form of INO.III
ADVERTISEMENT N OUR May issue we published a letterhead used by an Iowa Justice of the Peace in collecting delinquent insurance premiums. It will interest our readers to learn that this limb of the law has gone out of the insurance business, and if any one is in need of
a marriage license, hunting license,
