4oo
THE GREEN BAG
of that legal gentleman of Bevis Marks in the City of London "whose melodious name was Brass" marks Dickens' descent into the depths. While it is a neck and neck race between this specimen of disreputapility and Uriah, I am inclined to award the palm to the former. In comparison, Messrs. Dodson and Fogg ooze virtue at every pore. There was the office too
It would be unfair not to mention Miss Sally Brass "a kind of Amazon at common law " albeit that not having been admitted to practice she fell not as did brother Sampson. What a group of clerks there is, Wemmick, Lowten, Jackson, Wicks, Swiveller, perpetual Grand Master of the "Glorious Apollers;" Guppy, lovelorn but with an eye to the main chance withal; Smallweed, "with a rickety table with spare bundles of fossil Imp, nursed by Law and Equity, sired paper, yellow and ragged from long carriage by John Doe, his mother the only female in the pocket, ostentatiously displayed upon member of the Roe family; Mallard, Jinks, its top; a couple of stools set face to face on opposite sides of this crazy piece of fur chiefly to be remembered from the fact that niture; a treacherous old chair by the fire on a certain occasion he "retired within place whose withered arms had hugged full himself — that being the only retirement he many a client and helped to squeeze him had except the sofa-bedstead in the small dry; a second-hand wig box used as a de parlor which was occupied by his landlady's pository for blank writs and declarations and other small forms of law, once the sole family in the daytime;" and others who are contents of the head which belonged to the there I feel certain but whose names are wig which belonged to the box as they were not to be remembered. now of the box itself, two or three common We have, two types of magistrates, in books of practice; a jar of -ink, a pounce- Mr. Fang commended "for the three hun box, a stunted hearth broom, a carpet trodden to shreds but still clinging with dred and fiftieth time to the special and par the tightness of desperation to its tacks — ticular notice of the Secretary of State for these with the yellow wainscot of the walls, the Home Department," and Mr. Nupkins the smoke discolored ceiling, the dust and whose prowess stopped that little affair cobwebs were among the most prominent between the Middlesex Dumpling and the decorations of the office of Mr. Sampson Suffolk Bantam. Brass." And with these worthies we conclude. Though indeed "dust and cobwebs" in and It has been difficult to avoid degeneration of themselves would not have injured any into a mere catalogue. Extended comment one's practice in those days. Witness the is an impossibility within the limits of this condition of Mr. Sergeant Snubbin's room. sketch. All that is hoped is that the reader It is only within the past few years that we may perchance find revived his recollection have arrived at a point where the office of of some of the most dramatic scenes and the lawyer in active practice bears no re truthfully drawn characters in fiction. semblance to a vault in the Pyramids. NEW YORK, N.Y., July, 1908.
