BOOKS.
THE IRISH CHANCELLORS.• TILE biographical work by which Lord Campbell added a new terror to death has met with blame from many quarters, but the severest thing that has yet been said about it is contained in Mr. O'Flanagan's preface. He tells us that this ponderous work of his, which has occupied a quarter of a century in the writing, and, if such patience were still to be found on earth, would take up quite as much time in the reading, was suggested by the Lives of the English Chancellors. He was " desirous of compiling a similar work to that of Lord Campbell." How he has put his design in execution will be plain to any one who merely opens his volumes. Lord Campbell's Lives are at least readable, and their facts, how- ever untrustworthy they may be, have some bearing on the subject. Mr. O'Flanagan does not invent, we do not suppose he could invent if he tried, and his research has probably been deep and painstaking. But we do not think he ever tells a story without spoiling it, and instead of writing the lives of the Irish Chancellors, he rambles about picking up bushels of irrelevant matter which have only the connection of time with the subjects of his biographies. The fact that out of the whole number of Irish Chancellors treated by Mr. O'Flanagan, only two or three are known to us by name, is a further objection to his 1,176 pages. If it be urged that he is not responsible for the bIrrenness of his subject, we can only point to his own statement that many of the Irish Chancellors were able and distinguished men, who exercised great influence upon the * The Lioa of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Greed Real of Ireland, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria. By J. Roderick O'Flanagan, M.R.LA., Barrister-at-Law. 2 vole. London: Longman. 1870.
destinies of the kingdom. This may be true as regards Lord Clare and Lord Plunket, whose lives occupy the greater part of the second volume. But we have looked in vain among the earlier Chancellors for men of mark, for men of judicial ability, for men of public importance. Lord Chancellor Methuen, who is remembered as the author of the Treaty with Portugal, and who is, therefore, answerable for the monopoly long enjoyed by port and gout, could hardly have been acceptable in a claret-drinking country like Ireland. At any rate, he was a bad and dilatory Equity judge. Another Irish Chancellor patronized Handel during that visit to Dublin which formed a notable episode in the life of the great composer, and is commemorated in the Dunciad. But with these exceptions, we find nothing remarkable in Mr.
O'Flanagan's heroes. It is possible that such a total want of incident and character deterred Lord Campbell from adding the Irish Chancellors to the English. From a note written by him to Mr. O'Flanagan and from the statement of his daughter, it appears that he began to collect materials and read up the subject, but went no further. We cannot wonder at this, nor do we care to speculate upon the kind of work Lord Campbell would have written if he had persevered in his task. There is one reason, however, for which we certainly should have welcomed it : it would have saved us from this book of Mr. O'Flanagan's.
Perhaps we are trying Mr. O'Flanagan by too severe a test. It is certain that he has collected many curious details, some of which bear directly upon the Court of Chancery. Although there is little biographical interest in his book, there is much miscellaneous information. We cannot help remembering that some brilliant works have been written about the most prominent Irish lawyers, and that the Memoirs of Sir Jonah Barrington, Mr. Charles Phillips's Curran and his Contemporaries, and other books of the kind, have thrown a vivid light on the legal life of the early part of the century. Yet, though Mr. O'Flanagan cannot pretend to rival any of these writers, there is a humbler way by which he can remind us of them. He can either quote, or if that be not safe, he can allude to their more familiar stories. The lives of Lord Clare and Lord Plunket abound with these lucky reminiscences. We have said already that Mr. O'Flanagan's own versions of good stories are very much inferior to the originals. Strange as it may appear in an Irishman, he has a very faint sense of humour. His attempts to make and to tell a joke are equally ponderous. An instance of the latter may be found in the reproduction of the com- parison of one of the Irish Courts to the road between Chester and Holyhead. The Court in question boasted a clerk of the name of Moore, and was frequented by a dandy solicitor named Morris. The fact that this clerk was sitting rather higher than the barristers suggested to one that they were just under Penmanmaur, while another at once retorted that they were also opposite Beaumaris. The ready happiness and the aptitude of the reply are both spoiled by Mr. O'Flanagan's way of telling the story. Again, quoting an Oxford Commemoration squib,he confusesWorce,ster College with the town of Worcester, and infers that the third-floor windows of Balliol command an extent of some fifty miles of country. It isiwell that with such an inaptitude for seeing the point of what is amusing, Mr. O'Flana- gan indulges us with but few specimens of Irish humour. When he is content to quote in the words of others there is of course no such danger. The description of an Irish criminal court, taken from a sketch which is attributed to Shell, introduces us to one of O'Connell's moat successful defences. Nor is it the only instance in which Shell's sketches are found useful. Towards the close of his book, indeed, the habit of quotation grows upon Mr. O'Flana- gan, and he makes long extracts from debates which only serve to swell the bulk of his pages. The curious question of the amount of public money paid to LordiPlunket's family is left somewhat in doubt by this method of treatment. In one page Mr. O'Flanagan gives a speech from which it appears that the yearly emolu- ments of the Plunket family amounted to about /27,850. Lord Plunket himself as Chancellor had £8,000 a year ; one of his sons was his purse-bearer with a salary of £800, Secretary of Bankrupts with a salary , of £900, and counsel to the Chief Remembrancer with a salary of £300. Another son received £1,500 a year as Prothonotary to the Court of Common Pleas ; and a third son £1,200 a yeir as Commissioner of Inquiry as to the fees of the Courts of Justice. The Deanery of Down(£2,500) and the Vicarage of Bray (£800) came lower down in the list ; and then having exhausted his immediate family, the obliging Chancellor turned to that of his brother-in-law. These figures tell their own story, but when we turn the page, we find that story contradicted. What one debater had advanced was denied by another. Mr. O'Flanagan does not tell us which is to be believed.
The statistics of the receipts of the Plunket family are not the• only ones worth citing. We are much struck by the early success,. of Lord Chancellor Clare, as shown by his fee-book. In his very first term he made about £94, and in his first year £343. Such a- wonderful beginning contradicts all common experience, but we• must take into account the fact that Lord Clare's father was a. barrister. From his first to his seventh year his fees gradually increased, but then there was a sudden fall, from which he did not- recover till hebecame Attorney-General, after eleven years' practice. His own statement is, "from June, 1772, to June, 1789, I receive& at the Bar £45,912 8s. 8d. Of this, £36,939 38. 11d. was receive& by me in the last five years and a half." Mr. O'Flanagan us the salaries of the Lord Chancellors of Ireland from the earliest. times. At first the sum they received was £40 a year, exclusive- of fees and perquisites. By the year 1598 this sum had grown to- 1415 ; in 1666 it was raised to £1,000 a year, in 1709 to £2,000, in 1727 to £2,500, and in 1802 to £4,000, which is just half the- present salary. With £8,000 a year paid regularly, the Chancellor• of Ireland is in a far better position than his predecessor ba- the reign of Henry VIII. A letter written in 1531 by Alan, Archbishop of Dublin and Chancellor of Ireland, complains that his stipend of forty marks a year has fallen into arrears for two- years and a half, and that he has had to pay the needful repairs of the Court out of his own pocket. At a much later date we hear complaints of Chancery suits in Ireland being much more tedious and expensive than in England. There seems to have been no- limit to the number of counsel employed on either side, and all who were employed had to be heard, so that arguments were- interminable. "The Courts," says a legal writer in 1759, " must be kept in exercise by bringing some of the scattered forces to the engagement until the main body may come in, or the cause may- be undone. Then every one must speak in the cause, and so, as- they are seldom in the way to hear about what the others have said, repetitions necessarily follow." We do not know that our- own Court of Chancery was so immaculate in the reign of George IL, although probably it did not reach the climax of delay till the days of Lord Eldon.
The number of reforms introduced since then have changed the- whole system, and perhaps "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce" might now be disposed of by a chief clerk's certificate. As, according to Mr., O'Flanagan, the Irish Chancery has done its best to follow the example of the English, we may presume that the same expedi- tion prevails in both countries. A significant saying of Lord. Plunket's, when he was at the Bar, shows how the Court in. Ireland took the cue from the English decisions. "Are you sure,. Mr. Plunket," Lord Chancellor Manners once asked, " that what. you have stated is the law ?" " It unquestionably was the law half an hour ago," replied Plunket, looking at his watch, " but as. the packet is now due, I'll not be positive." The story Lord: Campbell tells in his Life of Lord Brougham of Sugden suddenly pausing in his argument because the Chancellor was reading- letters may be matched by a similar passage between Curran ancL. Lord Clare. To show his dislike of Curran, Lord Clare, during: an elaborate argument which Curran was addressing to him, stooped down and played with a favourite Newfoundland dog._ Curran stopped short, and on being asked the reason said, " I thought your Lordship might be in consultation." Similarly, when Lord Chancellor Manners brought a little boy of his into- court and gave him a seat on the bench, one of the counsel began to address the Chancellor as " my Lords" and "your Lordships.' An inquiring look soon brought the explanation, "I thought, my- Lord, the seal might have been put into Commission."
We have given some of the more favourable samples of Mr._ O'Flanagan's manner to make up for the severity of our judg- ment. It must also be admitted that there are other passages. which we might quote, and which show the author in a favour- able light as an industrious collector of miscellanies. The details. given about the early Irish ordeals, the legal quibble by which a. rightful King made himself known to his subjects, the night. affray between a Lord Chancellor of Ireland and the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, the contrast between the fate of an. attorney who carried off an heiress and that of a peer who com- mitted a murder, are all worth telling. But we have probably said enough for our readers, and we question if we have not sai& too much for Mr. O'Flanagan.
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