SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
(Notice in this column does not neceasarily proclude subsequent review.] In the learned pages of the current Law Quarterly Review we find a delightful article on " Bardell v. Pickwick" by Mr. Theobald Mathew, who commends the trial scene to legal students as "a reliable account of the practical working of the law of personal actions when Queen Victoria ascended the throne." He tells us that Mr. Justice Stareleigh called on "Brother Buzfuz " because they were both serjeants-at-law. Two learned counsel recently, on being asked to "pray a tales," were so alarmed that they settled the ease at once ; they would have learned from Pickwick how Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz accomplished the feat, which was nothing more than the addition of one or more common jurors to make up an incomplete special jury. Mr. Mathew thinks that Serjeant Snubbin may have derived his name from that of W. St. J. Arabia, Judge of the Sheriffs' Courts, but Arabia, unlike Snubbizi, was noted for his incoherence. The action brought by Mrs. Norton's husband against Lord Melbourne in 1836 gave Dickens hints for the opening speech of Serjeant Buzfuz ; Melbourne's letters were as trivial as Mr. Pickvrick's. Mr. Mathew tells us, too, that Mr. Pickwick did not go into the witness-box because until 1851 parties to a suit could not be sworn as witnesses.
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