Leet court

“ There are many reasons why this should be the case; the courts of law are free, and a sight that can be seen for nothing is of itself attractive, since we are, at all events, not losing our time and money too. Again, the most popular drama, the most popular novel, are those to which the dénouements can not easily be guessed; and in the court-house we see drama and novel realized with the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge—a matter of anxious speculation to the very last. ”

“ To the ambition or desire of honour is alwayes added an avidity or desire of riches in Courtiers: these two monsters being the natural production of Courts.
The Court is to the World, as a furnace to Gold, to purifie, and refine mens wits. Whensoever any bodies ingenuity is under a cloud, and not known, let him come to Court, for there without doubt he will be prest to an exact trial of his skill ”

“ It begins to grow interesting and I believe it will bear watching. Make me, then, as your lawyer, the custodian of all pertinent and impertinent papers. They can go into the locker where I keep your immortal but impecunious Will. Some day I might have to appear in court, I with my shovel and five senses and no imagination, to plead une cause célèbre (a little more of my scant intimate French) .
The explanation I give of this gratuitously insulting letter is that at last you have run into a hostile human imagination in the person of an old literary polecat, an aged book-skunk. ”

“ But the courtiers, the most learned, are the worst men when they come abroad that any man shall hear or read of. Many of the gentlewomen have sound knowledge of Greek and Latin, and are skillful in Spanish, Italian, and French; and the noblemen even surpass them. The old ladies of the court avoid idleness by needlework, spinning of silk, or continual reading of the Holy Scriptures or of histories, and writing diverse volumes of their own, or translating foreign works into English or Latin ”

“ I have seen six of the most distinguished literary men in England—popular men, too, as well as geniuses—give evidence in a Court of Law, and yet the calling out of name after name did not cause even one of the solicitors' clerks to raise his head from the paper which he was reading, and the jurymen chatted together without being in the smallest degree impressed by the prospect of hearing the great one's voice. ”

“ The word ‘Court’ and its derivations are frequently used by medieval and early modern writers with a special reference to poetry. The courts of kings and great nobles were naturally associated with the ideas of polite education; those men ‘that has used court and dwelled therein can Frankis and Latin’, says Richard Rolle of Hampole in the fourteenth century; the ‘courtly maker’ is an Elizabethan name for the accomplished poet, and similar terms are used in other languages to express the same meaning. This ‘courtly’ ideal was not properly realized in England till the time of Chaucer and Gower ”

“ The trials, both civil and criminal, will reveal the complete triumph of common sense and the Englishman will appear at his best in his court, for there he leads the world. The hearty good humor, alacrity and crispness of the proceedings, the absence of declamation but the avoidance of monotony by the proper distribution of emphasis, all combine to delight the practised observer. ”

“ Could we dispose of the time and energies of the young man who is destined—surely he is born by this time—to tell the story of English law, we should advise him to pursue some such course of reading as that prescribed for our Tripos, to go into chambers and into court, even to do what in him lies to acquire some small practice ”

“ French prose, which developed from the speech of the Court, is a delicate instrument, capable of expressing the finest shades of meaning, while the styles of George Meredith and of Henry James show how difficult it is for a subtle intellect to move freely within the limitations of English prose. ”

“ The philology is from the old French cort or curt. It is curious that it means something narrow. There are the suggestions of the lists, of heralds, of trumpets, of banners and knights in armor, of prancing steeds, of fair ladies watching, of joust, tournaments, and trials by battle. There is something royal about the word. We think of pomp and magnificence and purple robes, of kings on their thrones, with courtiers standing about. The conception of Diety to the simple man who visualizes, immediately takes on the form of a court. We speak of the Courts of Heaven. ”

“ Stones of Stennis and the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy; and so the little jury-court probabilities have been sacrificed without scruple, and that higher truth of character, and that exquisite portraiture of external nature, which give such reality to fiction, and make it sink into the mind more deeply than historic fact, have been substituted instead. But such,—considerably to the annoyance of the lesser critics,—has been ever the practice of the greater poets. The lesser critics are all critics of the jury-court cast ”

“ A reference to the actual condition of things at the time, as they appeared to the parties themselves, is often necessary to prevent the court, in construing their language, from falling into mistakes and even absurdities. On this subject Professor Greenleaf says: 'The writing, it is true, may be read by the light of surrounding circumstances, in order more perfectly to understand the intent and meaning of the parties; but, as they have constituted the writing to be the only outward and visible expression of their meaning, no other words are to be added to it, or substituted in its stead. ”

“ There is an old poem extant, written in very lawyer-like rhyme, which invests all the cardinal virtues, and a great many supernumerary ones besides, with the offices of this most honorable court, in which purity is the usher, truth has a silk gown, and virginity enters the proceedings on the record. ”

“ Probably the most finished talking and writing of modern times has been done in and about the French court in the seventeenth century; and it is accordingly there that we find men like Pascal and Bossuet writing a prose which for precision, purity, and dignity has never since been surpassed. ”

“ The learned Judge addressing the Prisoner, said.—You have been found guilty by a most fair and impartial jury of the very serious offence of having written an exceedingly poor play. Several of the witnesses have testified to certain literary merits which are to be found in your work, but sitting here as your judge, it is my duty to tell you that literary merit is only one of many elements—and by no means an indispensable one—that go to make a successful stage-play. ”

“ We are treated to an artificial court speech, which assorts with stereotyped emotions, refined, elegant, sentimental, rich in the compliments of court gallantly, often pathetic, marked with a distinct strain of philosophical commonplace, and fond of suggested meanings and double entendres, hinting at the events yet to come. But the dramatists made no serious attempt to create individual characters, and to assign to them a speech of their own; they vary greatly in merit as regards characterization, but even the best dramas paint types, not individuals. ”

“ Individuality runs through all we do, however seemingly mechanical. But are the points of a sort that you could make clear in court to the satisfaction of a jury?'
'I think so. Look here, for example. Certain letters get habitually mixed up in typewriting; c and v stand next one another on the keyboard of the machine, and the person who typed this draft sometimes strikes a c instead of a v, or vice versâ. ”

“ A gloss is attempted to be put upon it-which we think is unjustified and inaccurate unless, indeed, it can be asserted that the writer of the opinion did not know the meaning of the words he used, and, that the members of the court who concurred with him were equally deficient in understanding. ”

“ All such extraordinary alterations which a word has undergone in the course of long usage, and for which each linguistic text-book contains numerous examples, may, however, develop with comparative speed in each individual speaker, and if the development is not traced may lead, in the law-court, to very serious misunderstandings. ”

“ We can but oppose facts to wit, truth to satire. —How unequal the pencils! yet what these lines cannot do they may suggest: they may induce the reader to reflect, that if the prince was defective in the transient varnish of a court, he at least was adorned by the arts with that polish which alone can make a court attract the attention of subsequent ages.”—Catalogue of Engravers, p 135, 8vo ed. ”

“ Shining wisdom, they say, brings a man to Court—or should. And, God knows, there is no place like Court for folly! If thou art very beautiful thou may come to it, and if thou art as ugly as hell they will have thee for a laughing-stock and nine-days’ wonder. ”

“ Some particulars of the curriculum of a grammar school may be gleaned from an extract from an entry in the Ipswich Court Book of 1476-7. It runs:—
“The grammar master shall henceforth have the jurisdiction and governaunce of all scholars within the liberty and precinct of this town, except only petties called “Apeseyes” and song, taking for his salary from each grammar scholar, psalter scholar, and primer scholar, according to the tariff fixed by the Bishop of Norwich, viz. ”

“ I am forming an orator, whose business it is, not to adhere to one sect, but to go the round of all the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find, that the great master of ancient eloquence laid their foundation in a thorough study of the civil law, and to that fund they added grammar, music, and geometry. The fact is, in most of the causes that occur, perhaps in every cause, a due knowledge of the whole system of jurisprudence is an indispensable requisite. There are likewise many subjects of litigation, in which an acquaintance with other sciences is of the highest use. ”

“ In construing letters like those on which this suit is based, the language employed is one, but not the only, element to be considered in arriving at the intention of the writers. In determining the sense in which the words were used, they should be considered in connection with the subject-matter of the correspondence, the situation of the parties, the thing to be done, and the surrounding circumstances. ”

“ Our discussion led us to conclude that there was no ground for supposing the Homeric poems to have passed through such a stage as this—that on the contrary [Pg 305] they appear to have been preserved by court poets until they attained their final form. But heroic court-poetry is everywhere bound by convention. The poet must be a master of traditional lore as well as of form; but he must not be a revolutionary. ”

“ He was right. In me the lawyer’s clerk is in abeyance, the lawyer of to-morrow has disappeared, only the poet is left—that is to say, the essence of youth freed from the parasitic growths of everyday life. ”

“ Then the keow of New England; the oncet and twicet of Pennsylvania and Maryland; and the keind and skey of the London theaters, form rules of speaking. Is it the practice of a court, or a few eminent scholars and orators, that he designed to constitute a standard? But who shall determine what body of men forms this uncontrollable legislature? Or who shall reconcile the differences at court? For these eminent orators often disagree. There are numbers of words in which the most eminent men differ: Can all be right? ”

“ But since the object of Rhetoric is judgement—for judgements are pronounced in deliberative rhetoric and judicial proceedings are a judgement—it is not only necessary to consider how to make the speech itself demonstrative and convincing, but also that the speaker should show himself to be of a certain character and should know how to put the judge into a certain frame of mind. ”

“ So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune; ”

“ He must first of all undertake a careful investigation of the essence of language itself. A glance over literature shows how the earliest scholars have aimed to study language with regard to its origins and character. Yet, who needs this knowledge? The lawyer. Other disciplines can find in it only a scientific interest, but it is practically and absolutely valuable only for us lawyers, who must, by means of language, take evidence, remember it, and variously interpret it. A failure in a proper understanding of language may give rise to false conceptions and the most serious of mistakes. ”

“ The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, apart from its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms. In the curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric. The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. ”

“ The question whether a letter addressed to a fictitious person, known to be such, is a 'letter' within the meaning of the statute is more serious, and there are certainly authorities which lend support to the theory of the defendant in that regard. ”

“ Yet no readily ascertainable general principle exists for stopping short of that result were we to affirm the judgment below. For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric. ”