which would not be very difficult to fix?
If he were innocent, he would wish to be
questioned; if guilty, he would not; but
that is argument enough, apparently, for
letting ill alone. For a crafty murderer
might be convicted out of his own mouth,
and his crime brought home to him
without any difficulty or complication
whatever. And what a very dreadful
thing that would be. We have often been
amused, half in sadness, by watching the
eagerness with which our judges (to whose
unvarying and patient human kindness,
in criminal trials, no testimony too strong
can be borne) avail themselves of the loophole
granted them sometimes whereby to
creep out of this monstrous anomaly. An
undefended prisoner, without a friend to
speak for him, addresses the jury in his
own defence. By rule, he should confine
himself to comments on the evidence; for
his story should be worth nothing unless
he can call witnesses to prove it. But he
doesn't know that, and delivers his round,
unvarnished tale. The judge should stop
him, but does not; and more than once we
have seen a prisoner acquitted, with the
full approval of all in court, on the strength
of this most improper description of defence,
so completely has the manner of it
conveyed conviction of its truth.

The narrow limits by which advocacy
was so long confined in England go far
to account for the fact that we noted at
the beginning of our last paper, that forensic
eloquence has been comparatively rare
among us— till the end of last century
almost unknown. Criminal defences are
the advocate's great opportunity; and
here again, to recur to our opening
observations, the Roman and the Greek had the
better of us. All their great displays were
in that line. Cicero would not have made
so much of an action for trespass, or
Demosthenes of a case of ejectment, as they
did of their Milos and Ctesiphons; though
they would probably have shown great
ingenuity in following such instructions as
are said to have been given to counsel by
a defendant who acknowledged that he
had no case: " Abuse plaintiff's attorney."
The famous State Trials (from which
Mr. Forsyth has made some most
interesting selections) contain many speeches
good, bad, and indifferent; but for anything
like a high order of oratory we look
in vain. Plenty of sound sense, of ingenious
argument, of subtle pleading, and of
good old English; and many an appeal
touching in its straightforward and manly
simplicity, from prisoners denied any help
but their own, is recorded there; but little
besides, though even in their limited range,
and in the most truckling times, there were
not wanting advocates to win themselves a
name for courageous zeal in the interests
of the clients for whom they were only
allowed to speak on such "points of law
as might arise proper to be debated."
"I am pleading," said Hale, when threatened
by the law officer of the crown for
speaking against the government, on the
trial of Lord Craven, "in defence of laws
which you are bound to maintain. I am
doing justice to my client, and am not to
be intimidated."

The advocate, such as he was in his
"civil side " capacity, was an old institution
in this country; and we find him
distinguishing himself by his "quirks and
quillets" in the days of William Rufus.
In the reign of Henry the Third, John
Mansel gained such influence over the
councils of the king, that he "stopped the
mouths of all the judges and pleaders,"
much to the discomfort of the monks of
St. Albans amongst other people. As in
France, the advocates of those days were
the clergy. And it is worth remark,
that to that fact some have traced the
origin of that time-honoured monstrosity,
the lawyer's wig. It was at the beginning
of the reign of Henry the Third, that the
clergy were first inhibited from practice
as advocates, except in their own behalf, or
that of destitute people, gratuitous causes
in short, and to evade this rule and conceal
the fact of their profession, it is said
they invented the wig as a covering for the
bald tonsure: ingenious as ever in such
plausible devices. And it happened once
that an advocate, charged with malpractices
in his profession, had the audacity to
claim the benefit of clergy, pulling off his
wig in open court to show his shaven
crown. Perhaps he had broken the provisions
of a statute passed about that time
(1275) which condemned to be imprisoned
for a year and a day, and to be afterwards
"disbarred," as we should now call it, any
"serjeant, countor (i.e. pleader) or others,"
who should " do any manner of deceit or
collusion in the king's court, or consent
unto it, in deceit of the court, or to beguile
the court." This statute is almost a solitary
instance of interference with the autonomy
of the English bar; though in an old book
called the Miroir des Justices, there are
various rules, on what authority based does
not appear, for the guidance of the advocate.
The pleader was charged not to
maintain anything he knew to be false,