the realty, and it was not felony to steal them. If, indeed, they were taken away in a box, then it would be felony to steal the box."

In Joseph Andrews, the jealous Lady Booby, desiring to prevent the marriage between Joseph and Fanny, and get them out of the parish, desired Parson Adams to discontinue publishing the banns. The parson replied, that Lawyer Scout informed him "that any person who serves a year gains a settlement in the parish where he serves." Thereupon the lady sent for Scout. "I am resolved," said she, "to have no discarded servants of mine settled here; and so, if this be your law, I shall send to another lawyer." Scout said, "If she sent to a hundred lawyers, not one or all of them could alter the law. The utmost that was in the power of a lawyer, was to prevent the law's taking effect; and that he could do for her ladyship as well as any other. And I believe," says he, "madam, your ladyship, not being conversant in these matters, hath mistaken a difference; for I asserted only, that a man who served a year was settled. Now, there is a material difference between being settled in law and settled in fact; and as I affirmed generally he was settled, and law is preferable to fact, my settlement must be understood in law and not in fact. And suppose,

madam, we admit he was settled in law, what use will they make of it? How doth that relate to fact? He is not settled in fact; and, if he be not settled in fact, he is not an inhabitant; and, if he is not an inhabitant, he is not of this parish; and then undoubtedly he ought not to be published here: . . . if we can prove in evidence that he is not settled in fact, it is another matter. What I said to Mr. Adams was on a supposition that he was

settled in fact; and indeed, if that was the case, I should doubt... the subsequent marriage, co-operating with the law, will carry law into fact. When a man is married, he is settled in fact; and then he is not removable. . . . The laws of this land are not so vulgar to permit a mean fellow to contend with one of your ladyship's fortune. We have one sure card, which is, to carry him before Justice Frolick, who, upon hearing your ladyship's name, will commit him without any further questions. . . . To say truth, it is a great blessing to the country that he is in the commission; for he hath taken several poor off our hands that the law would never lay hold on. I know some justices that make as much of committing a man to Bridewell as his lordship at 'size would of hanging him: but it would do a man good to see his worship, our justice, commit a fellow to Bridewell, he takes so much pleasure in it; and when once we ha'un there, we seldom hear any more o'un. He's either starved, or eat up by vermin, in a month's time." . . . "This Scout was one of those fellows, who, without any knowledge of the law, or being bred to it, take upon them, in defiance of an Act of Parliament, to act as lawyers in the country, and are called so. They are the pests of society, and a scandal to a profession to which indeed they do not belong, and which owes to such kind of rascallions the ill-will which weak persons bear towards it.”

STERNE.

In "Tristram Shandy" we find a learned argument on the proposition "That the mother is not of kin to her child." The adjudication to this effect in the Duke of Suffolk's case, "cited in Brooke, taken notice of by

Coke, and found in Swinburne on Testaments," is thus stated by Sterne :

“In the reign of Edward the Sixth, Charles, Duke of Suffolk, having issue a son by one venter, and a daughter by another venter, made his last will, wherein he devised goods to his son, and died; after whose death the son died also, but without will, without wife and without child; his mother and his sister by the father's side (for she was born of the former venter) then living. The mother took the administration of the son's goods, according to the statute of the 21st of Harry the Eighth, whereby it is enacted, That in case any person die intestate, the administration of his goods shall be committed to the next of kin. The administration being thus (surreptitiously) granted to the mother, the sister by the father's side commenced a suit before the ecclesiastical judge, alleging, 1st, that she herself was next of kin; and 2d, that the mother was not of kin at all to the party deceased; and therefore prayed the court that the administration granted to the mother might be revoked, and be committed unto her, as next of kin of the deceased, by force of the said statute. Hereupon, as it was a great cause, and much depending upon its issue, and many causes of great property likely to be decided, in times to come, by the precedent to be then made, the most learned, as well in the laws of this realm as in the civil law, were consulted together, whether the mother was of kin to her son or no? Whereunto, not only the temporal lawyers, but the church lawyers, the jurisconsulti, the jurisprudentes, the civilians, the advocates, the commissaries, the judges of the consistory and prerogative courts of Canterbury and York, with the master of

the faculties, were all unanimously of opinion that the mother was not of kin to her child." This sage decision was based on the civil maxim, Liberi sunt de sanguine patris et matris, sed pater et mater non sunt de sanguine liberorum. "Let the learned say what they will, there must certainly,' quoth my uncle Toby, 'have been some sort of consanguinity betwixt the Duchess of Suffolk and her son.''The vulgar are of the same opinion,' quoth Lorick, 'to this hour.'"

I doubt the active participancy of the temporal lawyers in this decision, and am inclined to give the entire credit of it to those tribunals of which Clarendon wrote: "I have never yet spoken with one clergyman, who hath had the experience of both litigations, that hath not ingenuously confessed he had rather, in the respect to the trouble, charge, and satisfaction to his understanding, have three suits depending in Westminster Hall than one in the arches, or any ecclesiastical court." It would probably be time wasted for the members of our profession to look for this case in the books; as I suspect that notwithstanding its vraisemblance, it had its origin in Sterne's fantastic brain.

Sterne also, in "The Author's Preface," draws a picture representing an extraordinary state of things, in which persons of the learned and cultivated professions agree instead of disagreeing, and are directed by laudable, natural, and sensible motives instead of those selfish and inconsistent ones that usually guide their conduct. Thus he speaks of "fiddlers and painters, judging by their eyes and ears," and of physicians "feeling their patients' pulse instead of their apothecary's." As to lawyers he observes,

"In that spacious hall, a coalition of the gown, from all the bars of it, driving a damn'd, dirty, vexatious cause before them, with all their might and main, the wrong way! kicking it out of the great doors, instead of in! and with such fury in their looks, and such a degree of inveteracy in their manner of kicking it, as if the laws had been originally made for the peace and preservation of mankind; perhaps a more enormous mistake committed by them still, a litigated point fairly hung up; for instance, whether John o' Nokes his nose could stand in Tom o' Stiles his face, without a trespass, or not? rashly determined by them in five and twenty minutes, which, with the cautious pros and cons required in so intricate a proceeding, might have taken up as many months; and if carried on upon a military plan, as your Honors know an ACTION should be, with all the stratagems practicable therein, such as feints, forced marches, surprises, ambuscades, mask-batteries, and a thousand other strokes of generalship, which consist in catching at all advantages on both sides, might reasonably have lasted them as many years, finding food and raiment all that term for a centumvirate of that profession."

SCOTT.

Of the administration of justice in Scotland, Walter Scott, himself a lawyer, gives a most humorous picture in "Redgauntlet." In this admirable novel the character of the elder Fairford, a brisk, smart, pedantic, shrewd, learned, fussy attorney, is drawn to the life. His son, Allen Fairford, is designed for the bar; and the old gentleman finds an excellent opportunity to put him forward in his debut. Peter Peebles, "an insane beggar, as poor