Casemate

“ It is obvious that any juryman who allows his mind to be influenced by the mere fact that one of the witnesses for the defense is a pretty woman—even if she recalls to him his wife or sweet-heart—is a poor weakling, a silly ass. ”

“ It is no confession for a young lawyer to make; but sometimes at the full moon I am a little mad. Several of my acquaintances have admitted to me that they are. It is an odd fact; but that it is a fact I am sure. ”

“ I'll never assume that a rogue or a thief
Is a gentleman worthy implicit belief,
Because his attorney has sent me a brief
(Said I to myself—said I!) .
I'll never throw dust in a juryman's eyes
(Said I to myself—said I) ,
Or hoodwink a judge who is not over-wise
(Said I to myself—said I) ,
Or assume that the witnesses summoned in force
In Exchequer, Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, or Divorce,
Have perjured themselves as a matter of course
(Said I to myself—said I) . ”

“ Then, laying his hand upon the lawyer's arm, he added, with the same untimely accompaniment to accents full of sternness, "Look ye, Affidavy, you have heard too much for your own comfort, unless you are ready to hear all. You are a friend, or—a prisoner." ”

“ DEAR FRIEND,--I thank you heartily for your goodness in finding me a lawyer, but lawyers can do no good to me, whatever they may do to other people. But I am not the less obliged to you, dear friend. I foresee things will go against me--and no wonder. ”

“ It is said that the barrister who crams up a case with such care that he can examine an expert witness upon the Monday has forgotten all his forced knowledge before the Saturday. Certainly I should not like now to pose as an authority upon ceramic. And yet all that evening, and all that night with a short interval for rest, and all next morning I was sucking in knowledge and committing names to memory. ”

“ In what way thought you that a lawyer listened to your rigmarole?'
'I thought that you listened from kindness, sir, and compassion of my grievous case, and a sort of liking for me.'
'A lawyer like thee, young curmudgeon! A lawyer afford to feel compassion gratis! Either thou art a very deep knave, or the greenest of all greenhorns. Well, I suppose, I must let thee off for one guinea, and the clerk's fee. ”

“ Truly, Master Judge, he is a man much spoken of; marry, every man's cries are against him, and especially we; and therefore I think we have brought our Lawyer to touch him with as much law as will fetch his lands and my cow with a pestilence.
Thras. Sir, I am the other plaintiff, and this is my counsellor: I beseech your honour be favourable to me in equity. ”

“ And as I continued to walk up and down, and saw people looking askance at me upon the street or out of windows, and nudging or speaking one to another with smiles, I began to take a fresh apprehension: that it might be no easy matter even to come to speech of the lawyer, far less to convince him of my story. ”

“ The first emotion of the prisoner is a feeling of surprise to discover, that one utterly a stranger—the lawyer he has perhaps never seen, whose name he never so much as heard of—is perfectly conversant with his own history, and as it were by intuition seems acquainted with his very thoughts and motives. ”

“ I told him what the man had said, and he said, ‘Carrie, tell me all about it. What do you know about him?’
“Then I told him we were married, and had been for six months. He scowled and said, ‘Bad, very bad. I advise you to tell the gentleman the whole affair, just as it is. Do not try to protect the man; let him stand on his own merits.’
“So I went back to the attorney. ”

“ With the greatest reluctance, and the—er—greatest pain, I succeeded in wresting from the maidenly modesty of my fair client the innocent confession that the defendant had induced her to correspond with him in these methods. Picture to yourself, gentlemen, the lonely moonlight road beside the widow's humble cottage. It is a beautiful night, sanctified to the affections, and the innocent girl is leaning from her casement. Presently there appears upon the road a slinking, stealthy figure, the defendant on his way to church. ”

“ When two have set their minds on each other, a hundred cannot keep them apart.
On a fool’s beard the barber learns to shave.
287A man who was pleading asked a judge whether the lawyer or the physician had the precedence in any judicial affair. Says the judge, “Pray, who goes first, the criminal or the executioner?” “The criminal,” replied the pleader. “Then,” says the judge, “the lawyer may go first as the thief, and the physician follow after as the executioner.” ”

“ He maintained firmly at his trial that at none of these meetings was there any talk of murder.
"To be sure," said the judge, with a savage sarcasm. "In decent conversation there is always a reticence. Something is left to be understood." ”

“ I am sure that you, clever lawyer that you are, must recognize that my position is quite impregnable and yours weak and indefensible, asking me to be friends with people who 'outen the light' and to cut one with whom I can have such improving conversations as that to which you ignominiously listened just now! ”

“ So, however irrelevant the statement of a witness may be, the merchant juryman will use it to explain Saldo-Conti, the carpenter juryman to explain carpentry, the agriculturist to notice the farming of cattle, and then having set the problem in his own field construct the most daring analogies, for use in determining the guilt of the accused. And we lawyers are no better. The more difficult and newer a case is the more are we inclined to seek analogies. ”

“ My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there I have some times seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some position pressed upon him by the prosecution, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny. ”

“ I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.
‘The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream, that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the ornament of a book-cover that lay on my wife’s sewing-machine in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from my deserted party. ”

“ I should want to stand well with my neighbors, and be called 'Squire, and sent to General Court, for a term or two; for a plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me. ”

“ Yet the mutterings, which [Pg 413] from time to time came to my ears from one sullen lip or another, did not rise into frightened imprecation or even into any assertion of sorrow or contrition. It seemed as if some suspense common to all held them speechless, if not dumbly apprehensive; and while the lawyer said nothing in recognition of this, he could not have been quite blind to it, for he bestowed one curious glance around the table before he proceeded with old Anthony's words. ”

“ It has been said of a shrewd judge that the first question he would ask of the lawyer at the beginning of a trial was,'Who is she?' He believed that a woman had a distinct part somewhere in every case. ”

“ And since words that carry no meaning of importance are vain and puerile, the Court Lady must have not only the good sense to discern the quality of him with whom she is speaking, 178but knowledge of many things, in order to entertain him graciously; and in her talk she should know how to choose those things that are adapted to the quality of him with whom she is speaking, and should be cautious lest occasionally, without intending it, she utter words that may offend him. ”

“ God, man, what are you prating of—ghosts and Christmas jigs and tavern company—and here is a man’s life at stake! [To the prisoner] : And you, sir, I would have you know there is not so much occasion for you to make merry neither. You were not brought here for that, and if I know Mr. Attorney, he has more in his brief than he has shown yet. Go on, Mr. Attorney. I need not, mayhap, have spoken so sharply, but you must confess your course is something unusual.
Att. Nobody knows it better than I, my lord: but I shall bring it to an end with a round turn. ”

“ Now I rate no man by his size, color, or position, but I appeal to you in looking at the testimony that has been produced here, on the different sides of the question, and judging it by its intrinsic worth, whether there is the slightest possible comparison between the witnesses on the part of the plaintiff, and those of the defendant, either in intelligence, memory, language, thought, or anything else. ”

“ A gentleman cheapening fish at a stall, and being asked what he thought an unconscionable price, exclaimed—“Do you suppose I pick up my money in the street!” “No, sir,” replied the vender, “but I do.”
THE BLESSINGS OF TRIAL BY JURY.
A juryman, not so pliant as many, was repeatedly singular in his opinion, but so determined as always to bring over the other eleven. The judge asked him once how he came to be so fastidious? “My lord,” said he, “no man is more open to conviction than I am; but I have not met the same pliancy in others ”

“ Or, rather, their inclination is to confuse "a lawyer" with the law." A few confidential words with the old family attorney, they feel, and in some mysterious manner the affair is entirely off their hands. ”

“ The article in my mother's marriage settlement, which I told the reader I was at the pains to search for, and which, now that I have found it, I think proper to lay before him,—is so much more fully express'd in the deed itself, than ever I can pretend to do it, that it would be barbarity to take it out of the lawyer's hand:—It is as follows. ”

“ Therefore the course of conduct that I wish my Court Lady to pursue in love talk, will be to refuse always to believe that whoever pays court to her for that reason loves her: and if the gentleman shall be as pert as many are, and speak to her with small respect, she will give him such answer that he may clearly understand he is causing her annoyance. ”

“ What a picture a clever counsel could draw of this lady, tied to a man whom perhaps she detested, and with whom life in such case must have been an endless misery, brought unexpectedly in touch with the man of her real choice. ”

“ The story went that when the judge rose to speak, his spectacles accidentally fell out of place. "I am struck blind!" he cried out; "forgive me, Signor Avvocato—I have not yet pronounced against you." Suddenly his spectacles fell across his nose again. "Forgive me again," he said; "I can see after all!" ”

“ An attorney being much molested by a fellow importuning [92] him to bestow something, threatened to have him taken up as a common beggar. “A beggar!” exclaimed the man, “I would have you know I am of the same profession as yourself; are we not both solicitors?” “That may be, friend; yet there is this difference—you are not a legal one, which I am.”
NO STRANGER OF ME.
A parson who had a scolding wife, one day brought home a brother clergyman for dinner. ”

“ No; to help me look a gentleman at my trial. For months and months I haven’t cared a rush what I looked. But once I did; and I do now. It came back to me last night, when I found that pawn-ticket in this old waistcoat-pocket. I could hardly sleep for thinking what a sight I should be in court as I am. ”

“ Witness.— (Considerably subdued.) —"I beg your Honor's pardon—I didn't mean to be so brash. Well, Smith comes up to Jones all of a sudden and mashed him in the bugle—"
Lawyer.—"Stop! Witness, this kind of language will not do. I will ask you a plain question, and I require you to answer it simply, yes or no. Did—the—plaintiff—strike—the defendant? Did he strike him?"
Witness.—"You bet your sweet life he did. Gad! he gave him a paster in the trumpet—"
Lawyer.—"Take the witness! take the witness! take the witness! I have no further use for him." ”

“ I was very happy to have an otherwise lonely afternoon's ride beguiled with the company of the son of such a mother. I had never heard the Judge speak, either in court or upon the stump; but he had an [Pg 151] established reputation as an able lawyer and eloquent speaker. ”

“ This accomplished, and the papers safely deposited away in the wallet, the attorney wrung his client by the hand, and that somewhat wildly, giving him to understand that he was to hold himself in readiness that very night to escape, and recommending him to sleep a little during the day, the better to support the toil of flight. He charged him, twenty times over, to be silent and wary, to look as wo-begone and despairing as possible, and above all things to hold no conversation that could be avoided, with his other counsel. ”

“ He grows cool in his civility, and makes a point of being always busy on his arrival. Perhaps he has the good luck, at length, to shake off this pest of his premises; but it is more than probable that he submits to the terrific infliction for life, his confessor only leaving him when he is fairly in his grave. I once knew a dreadful case of confessorship, in which the shopkeeper had the hardihood to expel his visitant, and by a plan so ingenious that I think it worth while to advert to it. The shop contained four chairs, including the confessional, which stood opposite the door. ”