Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 08.pdf/421

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386
The Green Bag.

remarks Atkinson, J., would be in effect to say: "'I issue you this policy; I accept your money in satisfaction of my demand for premiums; I insure your property to be used in your business, but if you use it, your policy is void.' A parallel case, and one which alone adequately expresses the peculiar paradox in the case supposed, is one to be found in the sage advice given to her youthful daughter, when an affectionate but over-cautious mother, in reply to the simple request: —

"'Mamma,may I go out to swim?'

said to her: —

"'Yes, my darling daughter;
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,
But don't go near the water.' "

Brought up, as we have been, in the Chief Justice's school, this does not seem to us anywhere near "parallel," nor even at an acute angle. The Chief, we think, would more probably have been reminded of the feast spread before Governor Sancho Panza, which, just as he was on the point of falling to, was swept away by command of his physician. We feel a fatherly interest in Atkinson, J., but he must study more before he can be regarded as anything higher than a promising amateur in judicial humor.

Lumpkin, J., is more truly humorous in Davis v. Dodson, 95, 721, where the Court held that a member of a legal partnership could not bind his partner by an agreement to charge nothing for the services of the firm in collecting a note owned by him and sold by him to a third person under that agreement. He observes: —

"We had thought it a very (sic) universally recognized fact that lawyers are in the habit of charging their clients for services, and that the main object of forming law partnerships was the avowed purpose of reaping a goodly harvest of fees. In fact, complaint has frequently been made that lawyers are sometimes too diligent and over zealous reapers. . . . We have yet to see the rare spectacle of an attorney-at-law, or a firm of them, rendering professional services gratuitously as a recognized and customary incident of the business in which they engage. We have (sic) long ago departed from the honorarium from which our ancient ancestors in this noble profession either wholly or partly derived their means of subsistence.'"

So the "inexorable partner, Jorkins" got his own. There are certain persons who have attained fame in the history of this country as "signers." Bleckley, C. J., will be known as the great resigner.

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The Library of Julius Cesar. — It is noteworthy that great military commanders have frequently been fond of collecting books. Frederick the Great had libraries at Sans Souci, Potsdam and Berlin. Condé inherited a valuable library from his father, and enlarged and loved it. Marlborough had twenty-five books on vellum, all earlier than 1496. The hard-fighting Junot had a vellum library which was sold in London for fourteen hundred pounds. The great Napoleon began the printing of a camp library of three thousand volumes, in duodecimo, without margins and with thin covers, to be completed in six years by employing twenty-five editors and six hundred and twenty compositors, at an outlay of about one hundred and sixty-three thou sand pounds. There seems to be no record of the original Julius Caesar as a book collector, but Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls under James I, was a bibliophile. He was Italian by birth, son of a physician named Adelmare, who settled in England and was medical adviser to Queens Mary and Elizabeth. The son was christened Julius Caesar, and finally adopted that as his surname. The most interesting reminiscence of him is that he formed a traveling library of forty-four volumes, varying in size from four and three-quarters by two and a half inches to two and three-quarters by two inches, all bound in white vellum, and contained in an oak case, covered with ornamented leather and made to resemble a folio volume, and measuring sixteen inches long, eleven inches wide, and three inches deep. The books are arranged in three divisions — theology and philosophy, history, and poetry — are all in Latin and Greek, and were all printed between 1591 and 1619, at Leyden and Saumur. The inside of the lid is gracefully illuminated, and bears the arms of Sir Julius and of his second and third wives. This exquisite and unique library was acquired by the British Museum in 1842, and in Fletcher's recent work on "English Bookbindings in the British Museum," is an account of it, accompanied by three facsimiles of the exterior and interior in colors. There is also a picture of it in Mr. Roberts' recent "Book-Hunter in London." Another traveling library of which very little is known, was the door of Dickens' library, at Gad's Hill Place, which was adorned on the interior by counterfeit book-backs. The titles of some of them were very significant, as for example: "History of a Short Chancery Suit, 20 vols, and Index"; "Malthus' Nursery Songs"; "Socrates on Wedlock"; Noah's Arkitecture, 2 vols."; "Lady Godiva on the Horse"; "Captain Cook's Life of Savage"; "The Wisdom of Our Ancestors. Vol. I, Ignorance; 2, Superstition; 3, The Block; 4, The Stake; 5, The Rack; 6, Dirt; 7, Disease"; " Cats' Lives, 9 vols."

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The Deceased Wife's Sister. — A bill to abolish the law that a man shall not marry his deceased wife's sister, having been up in Parliament for the