TOPICS OF THE DAY.

BEAUTIES OF LAW-ENGLISH : MONMOUTHSHIRE TO WIT.

WE don't know why at a session of Oyer and Terminer held for ex- traordinary purposes, at the moment when all the high and mighty powers that constitute a legal court are assembled—here the judges, there the jurors, and in their respective places the clerks, the counsellors, the solicitors, the witnesses—one profound human in- terest, to which the entire world out of doors is responding, hold- ing all within in breathless expectation of the commencement of the proccedings,—we say we don't know why, at that solemn mo- ment, it should not be customary for some authorized legal person to get on his head in the middle of the court, and remark-

"Jibbity Loco ti foggleduin rum diddle ho buzzfuzz tibbledy bibbledy goose- foozle rum dowdy bumpty lillybo dickery hum doodle hum dickery doigo;" adding, however- " Doigo dickery bum doodle hum dickery ililybo bumpty dowdy rum goose- foozle lubbledy tibbledy buzzfuzz ho diddle rum toggled= ti hoco jibbity ; " and, to prevent mistakes- '"fibbleav bibblcdy goosefoozle rum dowdy bumpty lillybo dickery hum doodle hum dickery doigo jibbity hoco ti fbggledum ruin diddle ho buzzfuzz ;" and, lest there should be any cavilling at this-

" Buzzfazz ho diddle ruin foggledum ti hoeo jibbitv doigo dickery hum doodle hum dickery Jillybo bumpty dowdy rum gooscloozle bibbledy tibbledy; " and, to increase certainty in an affitir of such moment- " Butapty lillybo dickery hum doodle hum dickery doigo jibbity hoco It fog- gledum rum diddle ho buzzfuzz tibbledy bilibletly goosefoozle rum dowdy;" and, to anticipate any objections that might be raised to the last observation-

" Dowdy rum goosefoozle bibbleay tibbledy buzzfuzz ho diddle ruin foggle-

dum ti hoco jibbity doigo dickery hum doodle hum diekcry lillybo humpty ; " and (as our space unfortunately is limited) to go on, in short, re- peating these words, with no other variation, for not less than nine hundred and ninety and nine times consecuthely ; and after it is all over, for the judge to say—" Prisoners at the bar, you have given your best attention, I trust, to the weighty matters affecting your Jives which have been propounded in this indictment, with, as usual, all that force, and all that precision, and all that fulness and clear- ness, beautifully characterizing the language of the Gibberii. And, speaking of indictments, lest you should not know, I may inform you that they are always worded in that language by a wise and merciful provision of the law, in order to give the party ac- cused the opportunity of knowing the real charge which is made against him:* It is for this reason, unhappy men, that it has taken us two hours and three quarters to relate a remarkably short story, which would have been exhausted in a minute and a half in the ordinary way : it is all for your good, and that you may have the opportunity of knowing the real charge; for, you are aware, a good deal may hang by that. Look to yourselves, then ; for behold, if you understand not gibberish, prisoners at the bar, why it is a pity of your lives."

When we say we don't know why all this should not take place,

we do not mean that we ourselves are partial to buffoonery, but that as something diverting is evidently expected on the solemn occa- sion we have adverted to, (as a proper prelude to hanging,) we see no reason why the fun should not be made Wier. We assume that it is agreeable to the English constitution, that a solemn national proceeding, undertaken in the name of the Queen and the laws, should commence with a piece of fooling worthy a nation of Merry Andrews : we therefore merely submit the particular form of idiotcy we think most eligible.

Before we can hope to win the reader's favour, however, for

our specimen of an indictment, we must entreat him to turn, if he can, to the file of the Times for the past week, and read in the number for Monday 16th December, the one actually adopted, printed, and pdblished at Monmouth on the previous day, and forming the grand legal base-work on which alt the proceedings against FROST and his confederates are about to be raised. It is on his perusal of that document that we ground our hopes of his conversion to.fibbity hoco. The substance of the whole might, we compute, he handsomely contained in twenty lines—it occupies in the Leading Journal three columns and a half of small type. It is divided into four "counts," as they are called. The vulgar ima- gine that each " count " of an indictment must express some new point of the case : a vulgar error. In all the three last of the above indictment the reader will look in vain for any one thing that has not been said before in number one—and there not once, (for what in the language of the Gibbcrii is ever said once!) but many times. Having mentioned that out of four counts three are purely gra- tuitous, (grain/tows, but not gratis, at least to the public, who will have to pay the cost of the prosecution,) we will proceed to give the reader the pith of the one out of which the three are made;

hereby he may come, by an easy process, to weigh and know the exact amount of matter contained in this enormous mass of law- English. " The jurors present that the prisoners, on the 4th of Novem-

ber last, at Newport in Monmouthshire, made war against the Queen ; that they paraded, armed, through various public places, attacked various houses, obliging the inhabitants to join them, and seized arms from many persons with intent to destroy her Majesty's soldiers, and otherwise to prosecute their treasonable purposes ; that they marched into Newport and attacked a certain Sir N. TINDAL, on the proper Nature and Objects of an Indictment.

IC/large delivered at Monmouth, 10th December 1839.

house there, in which were several magistrates, soldiers, and con. stables, and, breaking into it, fired on and wounded them;' and that all this was done with intent to subvert the government and alter the established laws of the country." This contains all the substance of the first count ; which, with its original rubbish, occupies one hundred and twenty lines of small type in the Times newspaper,—an insult to every man gifted with a common understanding. The other three, as has been said, are simply the audacious recasting of the same rubbish with hardly the grace of a newdisposition of its rotten components, or the conk mon compliment to the discrimination of the public implied in the endeavour to humbug them ingeniously. What perfects the inso- lence is, each count sets off with this cool lie—" And the jurors aforesaid, upon their oaths aforesaid, do further present ;" after which promise of novelty, plump comes jibbity horn again da capo, every precious syllable in extenso, and all the re-repetitions re-re- repeated jusrpe an desespoir. If the reader has read our abstract of count 1, he will perceive that the prisoners are there, amongst several other things, charged specially with making war—we beg pardon, with " raising, making, and levying insurrection, rebellion, and war "—against the Queen. Will it be believed that count 2 is a count of that matchless impudence, as just, for all its "further presentation," to recite out of its predecessor this one charge, without adding a single new word to it ! The whole, being gutted like the other, is found to yield this total sense-

" And the jurors further present, that the prisoners did make war against the Queen."

Which being short, it only takes thirty lines to say it. In count 3, some relief arises from the way in which they seem to be endeavouring to say that the prisoners intended treason; for though it is being done for the seventeenth time, one is naturally grateful, be it only for a single word, that comes on the ear freshly. This we experienced in a passage where it is said, that they corn- passed, imagined, invented, devised, and intended to deprive the Queen " of her kingly name." We :recommend this to Mr. OWEN and others who appear for the prisoners ; for, however improper interference of any sort may be with her Majesty, we conceive it cannot be held for high treason to have intended to deprive the Queen of what constitutes no part of her actual prerogatives, and what most people will even be surprised to know she ever pos- sessed.

But we have a better bit to point these gentlemen's attention to. They can perhaps inform us, for we do not know, whether men may be hanged in this country on the faith of documents abso- lutely so put together as to be destitute of meaning ? because, if so, the sooner one emigrates the better. We take upon ourselves to- tally to deny that there is any meaning in the first sixty-three lines of the above indictment. In these lines, that which one could imagine to be the thing the legal ones are gaspingly aiming to stammer out is, that " they have got to Monmouth, and are armed with full authority ;" which, had it been represented in some such analogous form as this- " Il-be-r-re w-we-e a-r-re by G-o-d au-dl-t-ts a-a-11 r,r-r-i-gdit," would have done—we won't say just as well (for that would he to disparage a piece of at least terse idiomatic English)—but infi- nitely better, than the interminable and actually senseless piece of legal stuttering in which the presence and authority of the Court are intended to be asserted in this indictment. For is not sense, however short, better than nonsense, however long ? The only ground, of course, on which the Giblierii defend their dialect (the more the pity that it is untenable) is, that it is incumbent on them in their way of business to be, in an intenser degree than all other people, distinct and lucid ; that this is to be done by thoroughly exhausting every descriptive circumstance, and, aided by the powers of repetition, leaving nothing to conjecture or mistake. Now we maintain that they arc, in an intenscr degree than all other people, equivocal and dark, and this owing to the very pains they take to be distinct and lucid. When they think they have exhausted every- point of description by which a thing may be known, they have done nothing of the sort, and are as for from that mathematical certainty they aspire to as ever. For if the right of sophistry to raise doubts as to the meaning of things ob- vious to every uninterested reader be admitted, as it virtually is by all this trouble taken with the avowed purpose of anticipating and preventing its prevarications, eveq man who knows any thing of the philosophy of language can tell the blunderers, that their la- bour is thrown away; that no number of words can express the total essence of things whereby their identity can be so positively indicated as that the cooperation of the reader's judgment and the supplements of his fancy and associations can be dispensed with ; that all written language is a compromise with the reader's under- standing ; that the self-sufficient, abstract significance, arrogated by the lawyers for their deeds and documents, implies a total mis- conception of the nature and functions of hunian speech. Their three columns and a half may become three hundred columns, and be not a jot nearer the mark of unmistakeable meaning. But what if this blunder of theirs be so fatal a one that they continually wander further away from meaning, and sometimes, through love of saying much, come at last amidst a world of words to any—nothing? This actually happens to them ; whereof the example is present to us.

Look then, if you please, at "Monmouthshire to wit," and if you can discover any wit in it, let us know immediately; for at present we are under the gainful necessity of maintaining that it says no- thing; that there is even no grammar, ancient or modern, not the

lIebrew grammar, nor the Greek aforesaid, nor the Latin aforesaid, nor the,. French aforesaid, nor the Spanish aforesaid, nor the Ger- man aforesaid, nor any other kind, sort, description, manner, species, genus, order, class, or other denomination whatsoever of the aforesaid, that is to say grammar, and above all and over all, and at the top of all, no English aforesaid, that is grammar, which, being applied to the above sixty-three lines, will unfold any the smallest meaning for them; but that they are, and must to all time be proclaimed, positive, unconstruable, rank, blank, unredeemed, execrable nonsense. Observe—" Be it remem- bered, that at a session of oyer and terminer"—Ay, be it re- membered; the reader in fact remembers too well, for when he gets to the other end of the sentence he simply remembers what the Gibberii have forgotten—that the what "to be re- membered" has nowhere been announced—is nowhere mode-

rately conjecturable "Be it remembered that a session of oyer and terminer "—and away they soar into the great infinite of words, but with such flights on flights that home they never once return ; and what is "to be remembered" must to this moment remain a secret as well to the candidates for forensic honours, who can afford perhaps to be left in ignorance, as to the candidates for the halter, who perhaps can't.

This portion of the indictment is not only without any significa- tion as a whole, but is rich in the amount of its interior senseless- ness; the limbs vie with the body for the palm of no-meaning. Behold a specimen of the distinct- " Of whom one of them, the said Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, Sir James Parke, Sir John Williams, and Ebenezer Ludlow, sergeant-at-law, among others in the said letters-patent named, our said Lady the Queen willed to be one."

And the following may be recommended for a certain lucid force and elegance— "To inquire more fully the truth by the oath of good and lawful men of the county aforesaid, and by other ways, means, and methods by which they should or might better know by whom the truth of the matter might be better known and inquired into of all treasons," &c.

Amongst statistical observations on the indictment, it may interest the reader to know, that "John Frost," &c.— that is to say, a

complete enumeration of the prisoners, and all their confederates, known and unknown, with the statement of month, day, year, place, circumstance, and condition, of everybody and every thing, and generally a geographical account of the town of Newport, an in-

ventory of the personal effects of the men, and an analysis of their probable moral emotions—comes fauv-and-twentli times over in one

set form, in a document the real substance of which we think we overated when we said it might be conveniently comprised in twenty lines. We thought all this was going to be reformed ? it seems not. Let this last specimen of legal fooling, then, be treasured up for a witness hereafter, for it can hardly fail to help something when the time comes. By all means "be it remembered."