ponent as " my learned adversary." Griffin inva riably used the term, "my learned enemy." "As if it were possible for you to have an enemy," once kindly observed Charles O'Conor, when op posed to him. It was the statutory duty of District-Attorney Oakey Hall, of New York City, to attend an execution as witness, but he always shirked it. When Sheriff John Kelly asked why, he repeated James Russell Lowell's lines from " Fable for Critics " : — " Shall I look on the prancing Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing, Whose legs and whose arms go in curious divergence : His clothes to the Jews and his body to the surgeons?"
The late Recorder Hackett was given to clever repartee. On one occasion, in a murder trial, he had to speak severely to a medical witness called to explain a scientific operation, and who answered rather pertly on several occasions. On the next day he was still in the witness chair, when it oc curred to him to apologize. Whereupon Hackett said, " All right, doctor; yesterday you were a pert, but to-day I can call you an ex-pert."
One of the songs often sung at the mess in Gray's Inn, London, has this verse : — Now this festive occasion our spirits unbends, Let us never forget the profession's best friends. So we'll send the wine round and a nice bumper fill To the jolly testator who makes his own will.
The sarcasm of the toast applies curiously to the late Samuel J. Tilden, who was not only a jolly testator but an acute lawyer. The courts set aside a library trust in his will, and are now engaged in hearing an amicable suit for con struing some doubtful provisions. The refrain of the Gray's Inn song is even more precise in its sarcasm, for it runs : — Oh the law, when defied, will avenge itself still On the man and the woman who make their own will.
Sir Robert Graham, a Recorder of London, when sitting in the Old Bailey during the last century, was remarkable for his extreme courtesy and politeness. On one occasion, having sen tenced a convict to transportation, and being told by the clerk that he had made a mistake, because the prisoner should have been sentenced
to execution, immediately said, " Dear me, have I been so careless? Bring back the convict" — who had been withdrawn from the room. Which being done, the Recorder put on the traditional black cap and began : " Prisoner at the bar, I beg your pardon for this inconvenience of again summoning you," and then proceeded to pass the most awful sentence of the law — which Peter Pindar has thus phrased : — The Judge — the black cap on his head — Unto the trembling culprit said, "Hanged by the neck 'til you be dead."
A London paper states that, exclusive of costs, the fees and refreshers in the recent cause celebrc of Kitson v. Playfair for damages in slander amounted on both sides to five thousand pounds. What a chasm lies between such fees and the ,£250, which were the aggregate of all the counsel fees in the great trial (1688) of the seven Bishops of England; or between the "now" and the "then" of 1476, when an entry was made, still visible in the records of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, over which the venerable Arch bishop Farrar now presides, of a payment made by the vestry to a barrister with the odd name of Roger Fylpott, of his charges, three shillings and eight pence, with four pence for his dinner. The which is narrated in Johnson's Life of Coke, page 211. A negro having been arrested in Pennsylvania and lodged in jail, charged (1) with assault and battery, and (2) assisting a prisoner to escape, was confined some two months before the term ar rived at which he was tried. When incarcerated he was poorly clad. His case being ready for trial, the sheriff, who was also keeper of the jail, procured for the negro, at the expense of the county, a suit of shoddy clothing, costing about five dollars, and directed him to don them that he might appear respectable before the court. On the trial he was acquitted of the charge, but the jury imposed the cost of his own witnesses upon him. In accordance with the verdict sen tence was passed by the court, and he was again taken in custody and returned to jail. He soon complied with the sentence in every particular, but the sheriff refused to release him until he sur rendered the clothing. Motion was then made for his discharge, which was refused, the Court
