25 JUNE 1870, Page 17

SCENES IN COURT.*

WE have headed our review with the title of one of the sections of this book, and not with the title of the book itself, because neither illustrations nor text add anything to our general know- ledge of London life, while some of the scenes in court are amus- ing and characteristic. The other parts of the work are generally beneath criticism. We do not know which is worst, the drawing or the description. In the one we have a number of impossible people, in the other a theory as to what these impossible people would be if they were possible. Our judgment is not affected by the consideration that a few of the drawings are plagiarisms, and that much of the description is second-hand. What was natural and easy in Mr. Doyle and Mr. C. II. Bennett becomes strained and grotesque in the hands of the present artist. 'We know very often what his models must have been, but he has failed in bringing out the resemblance. Even the sketches in court, which are considerably above the average of the whole work, are marked by similar faults. We recognize some, not many, of the faces actually introduced among the counsel. The alderman, the crier, and the attorney at the Old Bailey are indeed unmistakable, but they are coarse and vulgar likenesses. The artist's know- ledge of his subject must be superficial, and the writer who has been engaged to accompany him is either a stranger to the Courts or is habitually unobservant. Wo marvel that any one can attribute Sheridan's skit at Gibbon's (vo)luminous history to Burke, can mutilate one of Lord Ellenborough's best sayings while adapting it to the present day, and can transplant some of Curran's most familiar repartees to the atmosphere of an English assize town. But when the commonest points of daily practice are to be described, we notice a want of fami- liarity which is even more suspicious. The examination of a witness against a boy charged with stealing a spade may serve as a sample. We should have thought that no one who had ever been present at a criminal trial could have made such a ludicrous hash of the evidence. According to the writer, the theft of a spade is to be proved by a witness who saw the boy carrying the spade iu the direction whither its owner had told him to take it. That is to say, you show that the boy did wrong by showing that he was doing right. The account of proceedings on the Civil Side at the Assizes and at Nisi Prins in Westminster Hall is not so absurdly inaccurate ; but we find a constant mixture of old scenes and stories without regard to fitness or probability. We have already said that Lord Ellenborough is modernized and mutilated. This is the way in which the writer tells the story. A young counsel begins, " My • London Characters and ilg Humorous Side of London Life. Illustrated. London: Stanley Slivers and Co.

lord and gentlemen of the jury ; my client in this case—my client, gentlemen—my client, my lord,—my client," and there he stops short, in an agony of embarrassment. The judge leans forward, and "in a tone of voice which with other words might have been taken for encouraging," says, " Pray Sir, proceed ; thus far the Court is with you." Why the Court should not be with him passes our comprehension, nor can we see anything severe in the words as they are here reported. But those who remember the real story will at once see that the writer has missed the point. The young barrister's words were, "My lord, my unfortunate client, my unfortunate client, my un—," and Lord Elleuborough said, with his blandest smile of encouragement, " Go on, Mr. —, so far the Court is entirely with you." If such mistakes were made with regard to all the stories told us, much better illustrations than the present ones would not have saved the book from the waste-paper basket. But the instances we have given show the writer at his worst. A much better impression is produced by the following anecdote. Some man who was judge in a small colony had to try a prisoner on a charge of theft. The prisoner pleaded guilty, but the judge, with that tenderness to criminals which charac- terizes the English law, advised him to take his trial. This was done, and the jury acquitted the prisoner, on which the judge addressed him in his sternest tones,—" Prisoner at the bar, you have con- fessed yourself a thief, and the jury have found you a liar,— begone from my sight !"

Those who have had much experience of Courts of law, or who have read any of the books on the subject, will feel the inadequacy of such sketches as these to represent its infinite variety. The artist may think that he has acquitted himself well in collecting so many different heads, some with whiskers and some without, some with the sedate spectacles or forensic double glasses, and some with the single glass stuck in a vacuous eye ; some hook-nosed and didactic, others flat-nosed and declamatory ; some priggish, and some lost to all sense of outward appearance. But Mr. Pickwick long ago spoke of the great variety of nose and whisker which the Bar of England presented, and a stroll through the Courts would furnish any one with more striking faces than those here commemorated. The same rule applies to the witnesses who are sketched and described. We need not listen to the cross- examination of the great masters in the art, to have better samples of confusion and contradiction than are given us in this volume. One of the best instances we have of the stupidity which recurs so frequently, and which assumes so many shapes, is the story of a witness being asked what some one died of. "He died of a Tuesday, Sir," was the answer. Whether in all cases artist and author have chosen the right class of witnesses for the parts which they have to play is a difficult question. One or two of the witnesses remind us so much of those sketches by Mr. C. H. Bennett which appeared in the Con:hill Magazine, that any such criticism of them would be dangerous. But in reality there is no reason why one type of witness more than another should be stupid, or knowing, or positive, or astonished and indignant. In the chapter on the Old Bailey we are told that it makes all the difference as regards a man's looks whether he is in the dock or in the witness-box. A nice and ingenuous lad in the witness-box turned out the very type of sly insidious rascality when he was placed in the dock on a charge of perjury. The man against whom he gave evidence appeared to have " the most villainous face with which a man could be cursed" while he was iu the dock, but when the tables were turned and he had to give evidence against his late accuser, his face, " though homely, beamed with honest enthusiasm in the cause of justice." This theory, how- ever, though it may be plausible enough to those unacquainted with Courts of justice, and though it may explain the want of trustworthy and universal types in the present artist's gallery of witnesses, fails when tried by the test of experience. A barrister soon learns to judge from the first words or the demeanour of a witness what kind of evidence will be given, and yet there may be nothing in the appearance of the wit- ness to lead to his being assigned to any of those classes which are treated here as representative. Again, the appearance of prisoners

in the dock has constantly the opposite effect to that assigned to it by the writer of this volume. "It is astonishing," he says, "how the atmosphere of the dock inverts the countenance of any one who may happen to be in it." And he tells the story of a counsel who, in defending a very ill-favoured prisoner, said to the jury, " Gentlemen, you must not allow yourselves to be carried away by any effect which the prisoner's appearance may have upon you. Remember he is in the dock ; and I will undertake to say that if my lord were to be taken from the bench

on which he is sitting, and placed where the prisoner is now stand- ing, you, who are unaccustomed to criminal trials, would find even in his lordship's face indications of crime which you would look for in vain in any other situation." Our own experience is certainly very different. The first three murderers whom we saw convicted, two of whom were hanged, were about the last persons in the world that we should have suspected of such a crime. One was a nice, quiet-looking lad, who had been a groom in a gentleman's service ; another was a pretty, rather piquante, but modest girl in pink ribbons, and with a pleasant smile for some of the witnesses ; while the third was an honest, hard-working peasant woman, the only indication of whose guilt was the terrible anxiety of her eyes. No doubt, one's first instinct on coming into a criminal court is to look for signs of guilt in the face of the accused, and people who look hard for signs of guilt can generally find them, but the test is fallacious. It is for this reason, amongst others, that the book before us fails to do justice to its subject. Had the artist drawn on actual experience, instead of trying to devise abstract types, he might not have felt that the end he had in view was as grand as that which has probably floated before him now, but he would have been more likely to avoid failure.