CEREMONIES FORMERLY OBSERVED ON THE

CREATION OF A JUDGE.

"The Lord Chancellor having taken his seat in the Court where the vacancy is to be filled, bringing with him the King's letters patent, shall cause the sergeant elect to be brought in, to whom, in open Court, he notifies the King's pleasure, causing the letters to be publicly read; which done, the Master of the Rolls shall read to him the oath that he is to take, that he shall indifferently minister justice to all men, as well foes as friends, that shall have any suit or plea before him; and this he shall not forbear to do, though the King's Letters,* or by express word of mouth would command the contrary; and that from time to time he shall not receive any fee or pension, or living of any man, but of the King only, nor any gift, reward, or bribe, of any man having suit or plea before him, saving meat and drink, which shall be of no great value;'t and on this oath

* As to the oath of the Judges, see 3 Inst. 223. Lord Coke in resisting the King's commands in the case of Commendams, relied upon this oath. See 1 Col. Jur. 1.

+ Sir Matthew Hale appears to have put a very strict construction on these words. See his Life, by Burnet, p. 31.

being administered, the Chancellor shall deliver to him the King's Letters aforesaid, and the Lord Chief Justice of the Court shall assign him a place in the same, where he shall then place him, and which he shall afterwards keep.

"The Justice thus made, shall not be at the charges of any dinner, solemnity, or other costs, because there is no degree in the faculty of the law, but an office only, and a room of authority to continue during the King's pleasure.

"The Judges anciently rode to Westminster in great state after they were so made. Mr. Justice Coventrie, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, being chosen a Judge of the Common Pleas, proceeded from his chambers in Serjeant's Inn to Westminster, accompanied by the gentlemen of the Temple and the Students of the Inns of Chancery. The Judge went foremost, after him the Bench, and then the Bar, then the Gentlemen of the House, and then the Students of the various Juns. But the order of this procession being found to be erroneous, (for the Inns of Chancery should go first, then the young Gentlemen of the House in which the Judge has studied, then the Bar, then the Bench, after that the ancients, and last of all the Judge,) the error was corrected on the following day, in accompanying Judge Tanfield of the Temple.

"In the same manner was conducted the pro

I

cession of Sir Henry Montague, who succeeded Sir Edward Coke in the Chief Justiceship of the King's Bench, Michaelmas Term, 1616.* First went on foot the young Gentlemen of the Inner Temple, (of which house he was,) after them the Barristers, according to their seniority, next the Officers of the King's Bench, then the Chief Justice himself on horseback in his robes, the Earl of Huntingdon on his right and the Lord Willoughby of Eresby on his left, with about fifty Knights and Gentlemen of quality following." (Herbert's Inns of Court, 91.)

ELOQUENCE OF THE EARLY ENGLISH LAWYERS.

The early English Lawyers do not appear, from what we know of the subject, to have been a very eloquent race of men. If we may judge from the reports transmitted to us in the year-books, their arguments were exceedingly pithy, and never wandered beyond the technical limits of the question. There is a passage in Sir Thomas Elyot's Governor, which confirms this view of the subject. "But for as much as the tongue wherein it (the law,) is spoken, is barbarous, and the stirring of affections of the mynde in this nature was

* See Bacon's Speech to Montague, on his being sworn in as Chief Justice, Moor's Rep. 826.

never used, therefore there lacketh elocution and pronunciation, two of the principal parts of rhetorike, notwithstanding some lawyers, if they be well reteined, will in a meane cause pronounce right vehemently." (Governor, p. 48.) The vehemence of the Lawyers is also noticed by Ascham in his Toxophilus: “When a man is alwaye in one tune like a humble bee, or els now in the top of the church, now downe no man knoweth where to have him, or piping like a reed, or roaring like a bull, as some Lawyers do, who think they do best when they cry loudest; these shall never greatly move, as I have known many well learned have done, because their voice was not stayed afore with learning to singe." (Toxoph. p. 30.)

Our old Lawyers appear to have been even more noisy than some of their brethren at the present day. "You are," says Lord Bacon in his speech to Sir Henry Montague, when the latter was sworn in as Lord Chief Justice, "You are to

admonish, to reprehend, aud to correct lawyers that observe not that discretion and duty which it becomes them. It is said, in France, that there is a rabiosa litigandi facultas; if you find this in any brabbling and tumultuous Lawyers, you are not only to enjoin them silence, but to sequester them from their practice of exercise before you, if you see cause." Moor's Rep. 827.

The lawyers of Elizabeth and James's day were

much too quaint to be eloquent. Some idea may be formed of their style, by looking into the judgments in Coke's Reports, and into the speeches in the State Trials. Chudleigh's Case on the Statute of Uses, 1 Rep., furnishes some excellent specimens of the judicial eloquence of that period. Thus, "Baron Clarke said some have supposed these future uses were preserved in the bowels of the land, and that the land should be charged Iwith them in whose hands soever it should come; and some have supposed they were preserved in nubibus and in the custody of the law, but he said, in our case, be they below in the land, there they should be perpetually buried and should never rise again, and be they above in nubibus, in the clouds, there they should always remain and should never descend." Another of the Judges "resembled the Statute of Uses to Nebuchadnezzar's Tree." Sir Edward Coke may, perhaps, be said to furnish a fair specimen of the forensic oratory of his time, and his speech, when Attorney-General, on the trial of Garnet the Jesuit, may be taken as a favourable example of his powers. It is full of the quaintness which at that day was so much in fashion. "He hath many gifts," says Coke, speaking of Garnet," and endowments of nature, by art learned, a good linguist, and by profession a Jesuit, and a Superior, as indeed he is superior to all his predecessors in devilish treason; a doctor