145

LEGAL SKETCHES-No. II.

THE OLD BAILEY.

In a former number we accompanied our ingenuous and promising young friend Octavius Harvey Tresham, Esq. of Elm Court, Temple, into the county of Kent, upon the occasion of his joining circuit for the first time. For the information of such possible friends whom the perusal of his adventures at Maidstone may have interested in his behalf, we shall now take leave to turn over another leaf in the professional career of that young gentleman, and follow his progress through a week's attendance at the Old Bailey, or, in more modern phraseology, at a session of the Central Criminal Court. Of wild beasts it is said, that having once tasted of blood, there remain no means of subduing their native ferocity; and upon some such analogous principle, the conviction of Peter Snubbins, the prosecution of whom, it may be in the recollection of our readers, had devolved upon Mr. Tresham at the Maidstone assizes, has so inoculated the latter with a thirst for knowledge of crown law, that he has decided upon slaking it at that supreme fount of criminal justice, the Sessions House, Old Bailey. Thither accordingly, one drizzly November morning, our friend directs his steps, and forcing his way through courts and passages, and up narrow staircases, all crowded with bustling officials and squalid hangers-on, policemen, constables, witnesses, jurors, door-keepers, sheriffs and aldermen, livery servants, attornies' clerks, pickpockets and loose characters of every description, at last discovers the barristers' robing room, in which he finds assembled almost all the counsel that habitually practise in the criminal court, robed and wigged, in readiness to descend there as soon as the recorder of London shall have concluded his charge to the grand jury. Hurried reading of briefs, cracking of jokes, drying of wet boots by the blazing fire, and miscellaneous small-talk, are the occupations which for the moment beguile that throng of learned gentlemen expectant. Ever and anon a rap at the door is heard;-it is an attorney, or one of the many impostors claiming that designation, enquiring for Mr. W. X. the eminent counsel. If Mr. W. X. be not there to answer the question for himself, some other counsel equally eminent in his own estimation, and who conceives that he would equally well answer the purpose of the enquirer, whatever it may be, replies in a gruff voice that "Mr. W. X.

VOL. II.

10

has not arrived, and will very probably not come to-day,"-immediately perhaps after the delivery of which speech, and as if to give it the lie direct, in bustles Mr. W. X. himself, in great seeming hurry and perspiration, and close at his heels follows the hang-dog-looking lawyer, with a bundle of dirty papers. Mr. W. X. shakes his head as he casts his eye over the prisoner's brief, which has been just handed to him; and among other "sotto voce" observations, is overheard to ask of the attorney "what facts the witnesses are prepared to swear to?" What facts are they not prepared to swear to, would peradventure be a more appropriate question.

It is at length announced that the grand jury are charged, upon which, "seniores priores," the forensic body wend their way down stairs into the old court; and summarily ejecting from the seats appropriate to the bar the jurors in attendance, and other loungers, who had taken possession of them, gradually locate themselves round a huge green table, upon which repose ponderous volumes of statute law, flanked by a number of circular inkstands prettily adorned with new pens and sprigs of doleful rue. Upon this, the first day of the session, the recorder of London is the sole presiding judge, and the better part of the morning is wasted in sifting the validity of the thousand and one cock-and-bull excuses with which the respectable householders of London and Middlesex endeavour to evade the performance of that patriotic part which they have been summoned to play in the grand national drama of trial by jury. At last, when by dint of overruling fantastical and far-fetched pretexts for exemption, some three-score jurors have been penned off by the dozen, like unwilling cattle led to a slaughter-house, ready for service when wanted, a jury is impanelled for immediate business, and one or two trials which have been postponed (or, technically speaking, traversed) from the preceding session, usually employ the remainder of the day, the court rising at five o'clock.

Mr. Tresham has passed the morning absorbed in tranquil observation of the ceremonial attendant upon opening the proceedings of the court, and has himself attracted the attention of his colleagues, the regular frequenters of the Old Bailey, by whom a new comer among them is always stared at with some mistrust and curiosity. Once indeed in the course of the afternoon, as Tresham's eye unconsciously wanders to a piece of paper on which the man seated next to him is carelessly scribbling, it accidentally encounters and embraces at one involuntary glance the following query: "Who is the greenhorn nibbling his nails at my left?"

The scrap of paper on which the above effusion is traced, having been squeezed into a ball, is chucked to a man at the other side of the table, who, having unravelled and read its contents, straightway lifts his eyes from the columns of the Times on which they were intent, and fixes them upon Tresham. Such circumstances, taken in connexion with the consciousness of having been actually engaged in the manner alluded to in the above flippant rescript, bring but too plainly to his mind the conviction that he has been himself the object of the impertinent enquiry; and yet he has obtained his knowledge of its nature in so accidentally underhand a manner, that he is of course compelled to repress and smother his indignation.

The next day, Tuesday, the hour of ten finds our friend at his post. He looks round rather scowlingly for his neighbour of the preceding afternoon, and exhibits, with some appearance of ostentation, his hands now clothed for the occasion in a new pair of glossy black kid gloves. Two courts are open to-day; but the business of them both is confined to cases of comparatively trivial importance, and concludes, as on the Monday, at five o'clock.

On Wednesday, the session may be said to be fairly entered upon. The court meets at nine A.M.; and at ten, two of her majesty's judges take their seat upon the bench with all due solemnity. The Lord Mayor is there in his robes of office, to receive them; the sheriffs of London and Middlesex glitter forth resplendent in their golden chains; the aldermen, in their silken gowns, assume an air of almost imposing dignity; the city marshall struts about, accoutred in a guise that assimilates his aspect to that of Magog in Guildhall; the chaplain of Newgate, in sober clerical robes, wears an air of sadness and gravity well becoming the direful exposé of human wickedness with which it is his professional lot to become acquainted. The court-keepers, in their efforts to enforce silence, are bawling at the top of their lungs; the clerk of the arraigns is rapidly gabbling over the formal technicalities of some two or three score indictments, to which a group of ill-looking and miserable wretches of both sexes and all ages, marshalled at the bar under the immediate surveillance of the governor of the gaol, are listening with a vacant air of recklessness and stupidity. The shorthand writers and reporters are nibbing their pens, the counsel that have anything to do are turning over their briefs,—and the more numerous of that body, without any briefs to turn over, endeavour to look as if they expected to be employed, and are hunting out, in books of criminal law, points of knowledge for imaginary future exigencies.

The court, and every passage leading to it, are filled with persons who have, and persons who have no occasion to be in attendance, the latter perhaps being, strictly speaking, in numerical preponderance,-all, however, wearing the same fussy, would-be business-like look.

Tresham has resolutely buckled to; and with an open note-book and a volume of criminal pleading before him, sits prepared to enter, con amore, into the proceedings of the day, and to cull precious points of crown practice from the objections that may be started by ingenious counsel, and the dicta that may fall from judicial lips. Not to lose a word of evidence, he has located himself close to the witness-box, to which, however, his proximity becomes at a later period of the day productive of some personal inconvenience, inasmuch as, in the course of a complicated case of sheep-stealing, half the carcass of a sheep is produced, in proof of identity; and being in a state of semi-putrefaction, it diffuses immediately around the witness-box, from which it is made to dangle, so overpowering an odour, that Tresham is fain to abandon his position, and rush out of court. He takes refuge in what is called the New Court, a subsidiary temple of justice, in which as many cases of felony are often disposed of in half an hour, as will occupy the time of the old one for a day or two. Not but that as just a meed of both justice and mercy is meted out to delinquents under the off-hand and somewhat slashing management of the able and kind-hearted personage who presides here, as under the more portentous and graver presidency of the queen's justices in the other court; only the cases that come before him, involving no questions of life and death, naturally lend themselves to greater expedition in the dispatch, and less solemnity in the conduct of them. Tresham here recognizes his friend the undersheriff of Kent, who fills the same honourable office with regard to the county of Middlesex, and from whom, as upon a former occasion, he receives an invitation to dine at six o'clock with the sheriffs. Graciously responding to the proposal, our friend passes the intervening hours in following the rapid proceedings of criminal judicature, and observing the demeanour with which the various convicted prisoners receive their respective sentences. Some of them,-unfledged boys of fourteen, with flippant and impudent assurance,-express their gratitude for transportation, and hope of meeting his lordship on their return. Others, young women, whom sin and obloquy have prematurely driven to courses of crime, are carried out of court uttering such piercing shrieks, that until lost in the vaulted passages that communicate with the gaol, the doleful sounds sicken the very heart. Scene after scene of fresh depravity

drives every preceding one from the mind. A sort of callousness to guilt and wretchedness ensues, enhanced by the occasional audacity of the prisoners, the impertinence or absurdity of witnesses, the humorous cross-examinations of counsel, and the bandying of jokes by the unengaged portion of the bar. "The sentence of the court is, that you be transported for fifteen years," observes the judge to an urchin just convicted for the third time of larceny. "Warrant my return at the end of the term, and transport me for a like one," exclaims Mr. ***, who at sixty-nine retains all the elastic spirits and high attainments of early youth. "What are you?" says Counsellor P. to a witness between six and seven feet high. "Serjeant-major to the 94th regiment," replies the man, with his hand to his head. Your lordship's rank was not quite so high," rejoins the great advocate, turning towards the judge, who in early life had been in the army himself; "you only rose to be common serjeant!" How is any one to take a sober and saddened view of the serious investigations which are going forward, while such sallies are popping around him?

66

In due season, Mr. Tresham joins the almost processional dinner party on its way to the banquet-room, situate up two pair of stairs. The lord mayor presides at the dining-table, and one of the judges of the land sits on each side of him. These learned personages are flanked by sheriffs and aldermen, all richly bedizened in purple,—by barristers in full forensic costume, and a few casual visitors. The reverend ordinary of Newgate, duly habited in sacerdotal robes, pronounces a long grace, in the course of which he invokes benedictions upon all the legal and city functionaries in rotation, after which the guests fall to upon a very substantial entertainment with such appetites as the close foul air they have been all day inhaling may have left them. Ceremonious civility, rather than easy cordiality, reigns at these ex officio repasts, the partakers of which, all dressed up in cumbrous habits for the occasion, and more or less awed by the presence of such exalted civil and civic magistrates, seem intrenched in stiffness and form. Routine toasts and speeches follow each other after dinner,—a spirit of more active conviviality appearing to invade the company upon the early departure of the judges. Tresham, who has drunk wine with every person at table, and extensively varied his potations, feels in no way inclined to resume his attendance at the evening sittings of the courts, which are now prolonged to nine P.M.-So walks off to the temple, finding even the air of Fleet street fresh and fragrant by comparison with the polluted atmosphere he has breathed for the last few hours.