POETRY.-On The Chicago Surrender, 2. The Pure in Heart, 2. The Exile's Prayer, 2. Daybreak in London, in July, 17. Mobile Bay, 18. WE have, at last, with great regret, sold the stereotype plates of the First Series of The Living Age, to be melted by type-founders. We have a small number of copies of the printed work remaining, which we shall be glad to receive orders for so long as we can supply them. ATTENTION is respectfully requested to the following 66 The Publishers have resisted as long as they could the growing necessity of advancing the price of this work. But when paper costs three times as much as before, and a remittance to London more than twelve dollars for a pound, and every other expense of manufacture is greatly increased (saying nothing of the expense of living), it is evident that sooner or later the Proprietors must follow the course of The Trade. The change is made only after every other resource has been exhausted; and we confidently appeal to the kindness and justice of our old friends, asking them, not only to continue their own subscriptions, but to add the names of their friends to our list. Our Terms now are $8 a Year, free of postage. 18 Cents a number. Bound Volumes, $2.75. Complete sets, or sets of the First, Second, or Third Series, $2.50 a volume, in Cloth. Price to The Trade will be advanced 3 Cents a number. BINDING. The price of Binding is 75 Cents a Volume. 2 ON THE CHICAGO SURRENDER. THE PURE IN HEART. ON THE CHICAGO SURRENDER. won, And strike her brave bird from his home in the sun? He's a coward who shrinks from the lift of the sword; He's a traitor who mocks at the sacrifice poured ; The knave who stands idly till peril is past; Is the old spirit dead? Are we broken and weak, Give thanks, ye brave boys, who by vale and by crag Bear onward, unfaltering, our noble old flag, And you, ye war martyrs who preach from your How captives are nursed by the masters of slaves, And shout, till those cowards rejoice at the cry, By the hands of the Union we fought for we die !" By the God of our fathers! this shame we must share; But it grows too debasing for freemen to bear, When the Union shall rest on two races of slaves, THE PURE IN HEART. BY ALICE CARY. The storms of sorrow wildly beat. The clouds with death are chill; His love; what more is ours? Descends upon the flowers, His grace descends, and as of old, Thou need'st not ask the angels where Keep thou thy spirit clean and fair, THE EXILE'S PRAYER. [In his work on the Mind, Dr. Rush mentions the fact, attested by clergymen of his acquaintance, that the aged foreigners whom they attended generally prayed, on their death-beds, in their native language, though in many cases they had not spoken it for fifty or sixty years.] He speaks! The lingering locks that, cold And few and gray, fall o'er his brow, Life's last dim embers, waning, burn, His childhood's gushing words return. Before those wet and clouded eyes, His childhood's wakened memories rise! That smiled around his sinless home, He treads that soil, the first he pressed; He clasps and climbs his father's knee; Warm from his lisping lips of yore, "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall And if one voice reach Mercy's ear, see God." I ASKED the angels in my prayer, To show mine eyes the kingdom where I said, "My way with doubt is dim, Oh, come, and help me build to him That blessed voice is surely thine! it was as much a matter of course for a judge to reside in or about Bloomsbury as for a barrister to have chambers in an inn of court; and James Smith used to say that when Lord Ellenborough set the present fashion, by removing from Russell Square to St. James's, the circumstance gave general dissatisfaction, and was a prominent topic in the newspapers for a week. From Fraser's Magazine. THE JUDGES OF ENGLAND. We are about to attempt a sketch of the Judges of England, and we are reluctantly compelled to begin with the admission that they do not stand so high in the popular estimate, nor occupy a position of the same political and social importance, as in the olden time. Yet English justice was never more respected; and complaints of the administration of the law are almost exclusively confined to its costliness, which the best-intentioned law-reformers have hitherto proved unable to restrict within satisfactory limits. Are, then, the most conspicuous members of the judicial hierarchy, the judges of Westminster Hall, with whom principally we have to deal in this place, deficient in the personal qualities which should adorn and dignify the bench? Do they, although confessedly incorrupt and impartial, want learn-"6 ing, accomplishments, elocution, or urbanity? Are they of lower birth and breeding, or of inferior general education to their predecessors? Such certainly is the more obvious conclusion; but, before hastening to it, we must take into consideration sundry social changes which may have co-operated in the production of the result by gradually lessening the comparative rank and influence of this venerable body, without presupposing any positive decline in its constitution or demerit in its chiefs. Now, on looking round, we see that not merely the legal profession, but the learned professions individually and collectively, have suffered in one sense from the diffusion of knowledge, the rise of the commercial and manufacturing classes, and the immeasurable intellectual advance of the landed aristocracy. It has been of late as difficult, if not as impossible, for lawyers to keep their vantageground, as it was for the clergy, so long the monopolists of cultivation, to prevent the laity from eventually overtaking or surpassing them. The alteration of manners and habits has operated in the same direction; for it would require an extraordinary degree of personal eminence to secure, for any set of dignitaries, when mingling in the crowd, the same respect which is exacted from the mass of mankind by becoming seclusion or exclusiveness. Till after the commencement of the century, Again, the distinctive dress was not entirely given up till a much later period. Sir James Allan Park stuck to the square-cut coat, the scratch wig, the three-cornered hat, and the black breeches and stockings, to his dying day; and he might have been seen shaking his head reproachfully, when told of the appearance of a dandified colleague, his equal or superior in every other judicial requisite, in a figured waistcoat and carrying a crushhat at a ball. In the curious work entitled Armata," Lord Erskine gravely maintained that the judges should never be seen in the streets, going to or returning from the courts, without their official costume. "If the robes of justice do not inspire the multitude with an additional respect for the magistrates, why are they worn at all? and if they have that effect, why should the illusion be so abruptly overthrown, by exhibiting to the populace the very same men, looking, perhaps, from careless habits, more meanly than thousands who had but a moment before beheld them with salutary awe?" At present the judges are scattered over all the most fashionable quarters of the metropolis; they frequent clubs; they live, dress, and visit like other people; and some of them affect the manners of men of the world, or even occasionally of men of wit and pleasure about town. Whether their ermine remains as white to the vulgar eyes,—whether they do not lose, upon the whole, by descending to this description of social rivalry, may fairly be made a question. Lord Mansfield, the silver-tongued Murray, when young at the bar, drank champagne with the wits with impunity; but when Lord Loughborough (Wedderburne) tried the experiment at a more advarced period of his career, he failed signally. Foote asked, "What can he mean by coming amongst us? He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others; " and Johnson remarked of him to Reynolds, “This man has now been ten years about town, and has from him in company that was at all striking." made nothing of it. I never heard anything three years in his house; but I lived, that is to say, I spent my days, in Southampton Row, as you may well remember. There was I and the future lord chancellor (Thurlow) constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making others giggle, instead of studying the law." 66 Lord Grenville used to say that he liked dining in company with lawyers, because the chances were that some good topic would be rationally discussed; and Sir Walter Scott sets down in his diary in 1828: "We dined Instead of placing young men intended for at Richardson's with the two chief barons of the bar in the office of an attorney or solicEngland and Scotland (Sir William Alexan-itor, it is now, we believe, the almost unider and Sir Samuel Shepherd), odd enough, versal practice for them to pass a year or two the one being a Scotsman and the other an in the chambers of a special pleader, equityEnglishman-far the pleasantest day we have draftsman, or conveyancer; but it may be had. I suppose I am partial; but I think made a question whether any marked imthe lawyers beat the bishops, and the bishops provement has taken place in the practising the wits." Both the statesman and the poet, section of the bar, the class from which the however, were speaking of the best specimens judicial body must be supplied. Most assurof the old school: and, prior to their time, some edly its claims to superior gentility have matecauses of deterioration were at work. One rially declined since 1601; when (as we learn is mentioned by Blackstone in his first Vine- from Dugdale), more by way of confirming an rian Lecture, where, arguing in favor of existing state of things than as an innovauniversity education, he deprecates the cus- tion, a royal ordinance, countersigned by Batom, by some so very warmly recommended, con, provided that" none should be admitted of dropping all liberal education as of no use of an inn of court that is not a gentleman by to students in the law, and placing them, in descent." And those were days when the its stead, at the desk of some skilful attor- unauthorized assumption of name, crest, or ney," rightly contending that no general rules shield subjected the self-dubbed armiger to can be drawn from the anomalous success of severe penalties. At present, one of the "some geniuses formed to overcome all dis- most marked features of what is called the advantages." higher branch of the profession is its family One such genius was the chancellor, Lord or blood connection with the lower,-in other Hardwick, himself the son of a Dover attor-words, the number of barristers who are more ney; he was placed in the office of an emi- or less related to attorneys. There is hardly nent London attorney, who boasted of hav- an eminent firm in town or country, some ing had amongst his clerks or pupils, and partner in which has not a son, brother, about the same time, Jocelyn, afterwards nephew, cousin, brother-in-law, or son-in-law Lord Chancellor of Ireland; Parker, who at the bar. The result was pointed out by became Chief Baron of the Exchequer; and Mr. Justice Talfourd in one of his most eloStrange, who rose to be Master of the Rolls. quent essays. No rule of etiquette, as he Kenyon and Dunning (Lord Ashburton) re-justly remarks, however strict, and no feelings ceived the same training, and their mode of life is described by Horne Tooke, a fellowstudent at the Temple. Out of term, they used to dine at an eating-house near Chancery Lane, at the charge of sevenpence halfpenny a head. "Dunning and myself," added Tooke, "were generous; for we gave the girl who waited upon us a penny apiece; but Kenyon, who always knew the value of money, sometimes rewarded her with a halfpenny, and sometimes with a promise." Another curious example may be read in a familiar letter of the poet Cowper, who writes, "I did actually live three years with Mr. Chapman, a solicitor; that is to say, I slept of delicacy, however nice and generous, can prevent men who have connections or intimate acquaintances of this sort, from possessing a great advantage over their equals who have none. "Without industry and talent they could have done little; but perhaps with both these they might have done less, if their early fame had not been nurtured by those to whom their success was a favorite object, and whose zeal afforded them at once opportunity and stimulus which to more elevated adventurers * When Jekyll was asked the difference between an attorney and a solicitor, he said, "about the same licitor is a chancery attorney; and the two charas that between a crocodile and an alligator. A soacters are commonly combined in the same person." 8 his vanity. The very juries at length became alive to this defect. are wanting." This is tantamount to saying that these more elevated adventurers have hourly less and less chance of obtaining the When Sir R. Rolfe (Lord Cranworth), an higher prizes; and so have all who, before equity lawyer, was made a baron of the exsecuring a firm hold on the dispensers of chequer, it was said that he hesitated before briefs, have acquired a name in literature. accepting the dignity, and it was expected The author of "Ion " was the leader of his cir- that, from want of practice in common law cuit, and a sergeant, before he ventured to an- and criminal trials, he would cut a bad figure nounce himself as the author of a popular for a season. He shone forth at once as one drama; and on the first night of its perfor- of the best nisi prius judges ever known. mance the stage-box was exclusively occupied At his very first circuit, it was an intellecby his brethren of the coif. tual treat to hear him sum up in a complicat When the late Lord Campbell exercised his undoubted prerogative as lord chancellor in naming Mr. Justice Blackburn to a vacant seat in the Queen's Bench, even the bulk of the profession were taken by surprise, and the appointment was loudly denounced as a piece of Scotch nepotism by the most influ There is one road to promotion, much trod-ed cause. den of late years, which renders the bench more easily accessible to the higher class of aspirants, and so compensates in one way for the mischief it is supposed to work in another. When a preference is given to members of Parliament, and party services are allowed to do duty as makeweights, what is lost in technical knowledge and professional experiential portion of the press. It was said, and ence may be regained in ready eloquence, in we believe truly, that when the proposal was general accomplishments, in bearing, and in first made to the dignitary elect, he mistook tone. All these are valuable, if not essen-it for an offer of a local judgeship, and asked tial, requirements in a judge, who has to go time to consider. Mr. Justice Blackburn circuits and try causes, as well as to sit in (despite of some uncouthness of manner) is banco and deliver judgments on points of law. confessedly one of the main pillars of his It is an obvious advantage that he should court. leave a good impression on the magistrates and grand jurymen with whom he is brought in close contact at the assizes; and considerable command of language is required to enable him to expose the sophistry of counsel, and pave the way for a sound verdict, by accordance with the facts. clear and sound summing up. Besides, when the lord chancellor or the government is blamed for not accepting public or professional opinion as a peremptory guide in their selections, they may be tempted to recall some remarkable instances in which public and professional opinion was notoriously at fault. Having now shown plausible grounds why some diminution of social importance, if not of solid worth, may have been anticipated in the judicial body, let us see how far the a priori and possibly superficial argument is in Without pleading guilty to any culpable superstition as to numbers, we own to a feeling of regret when the twelve judges of England were increased by three; for there is little chance that the English public will ever acquire for the fifteen the same prescriptive reverence which is felt by the Scotch. "A man's aye the better thought o' in our country," was Dandie Dinmont's reply to Counsellor Pleydell," for having been afore the Feifteen." Besides, the supply was not more than equal to the demand prior to the augmentation, which took place in 1830. The three principal common-law tribunals are now composed as follows: It was taken for granted, when Sir James Scarlett became Lord Abinger and Chief Baron, that he would try causes to admiration. But it is difficult to conceive a more perverted use of an unparalleled combination of peculiar faculties. The ingrained habits of advocacy were too strong for him; instead of aiming at truth and justice, he chose a side, commonly the weakest and the worst, as affording more scope for ingenuity, and employed his wonderful power of selecting and marshalling facts for the gratification of The Common Pleas.-Chief Justice, Erle. The Queen's Bench.-Chief Justice, Cockburn. Puisne judges: Crompton, Blackburn, Mellor, and Shee. |