In selecting a subject for this address I found myself somewhat in the predicament of Solomon John Peterkin, who, having been selected by the family to write a book, and having surrounded himself with a supply of ink, pens, and paper, was puzzled to know what to write about. For one who is honored with an invitation to address the students of a law school is expected, I suppose, to speak upon a subject having at least some nominal connection with the law, while, if he, attempts the discussion of a technical question, he exposes himself to the danger of having his theories dissected or his conclusions disproved in the classrooms on the morrow. Then it occurred to me that, perhaps, in your devotion to Bracton, the Year Books, and Coke on Littleton, you might be neglecting some of the more modern writers, who have been bold enough to borrow from Justinian the title of Novels for their books, which looks very much like what is called Unfair Trade Compe

'An address read before the students of the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania on April 5, 1905, by John Marshall Gest, of the Philadelphia Bar.

tition. So, these literary pirates sometimes call their productions Fiction, though everyone knows that the real, genuine, original Fictions are the fictions of law, which Jeremy Bentham says are the most pernicious and basest sort of lying, while Blackstone says that, though at first they may startle the student, he will find them, on further consideration, to be highly beneficial and useful.

Now, you may learn a great deal of law in a very agreeable way by reading novels. Thus, in "Ten Thousand a Year" you find the old action of ejectment, with all its fictions and prolixities, fully described; the plot of “ Felix Holt" turns upon a base fee, and I believe George Eliot obtained professional advice upon her book before it was published. In "Cæsar Birotteau" Balzac explains in detail the French law of bankruptcy; while in other books forged wills and murder trials of the most thrilling sort abound. Sometimes these legal novelists are not very accurate in their law, but that should only serve to stimulate the reader's criticism. Shakespeare's plays, as we all know, are crammed with legal allusions; and Sir Walter Scott, who was a lawyer by profession, and a well-read lawyer too, made good use of his legal learning. Nothing of the kind is more amusing than his account of the great case of Peebles v. Planestanes in "Redgauntlet;" while "Anne of Geierstein" is worth reading for the sake of the Vehmgericht.

But to-day we may be able to find enough in Dickens to Occupy the time. Indeed, it makes little difference what subject is selected, provided we don't stick too closely to it. As Mrs. Squeers used to say to the boys when they labored under extraordinary ill usage, "It will be all the same a hundred years hence."

Now, after I had selected my subject, I found, in reading Mr. Birrell's interesting and I may say pathetic biography of Sir Frank Lockwood, that this distinguished and witty lawyer had written a lecture on "The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick," and I should be extremely loath, although I have not been able to find a copy, to attempt anything which might infringe on his copyright. To be sure, a subject like this is, in a sense, Tom Tiddler's ground, but I will respect

Lockwood's title by occupancy, though with regret, as "Pickwick," the early fruit of Dickens's genius, was his best, at least most characteristic, work.

I shall neither sketch the life of Dickens, nor attempt any criticism of his work; but it is well to recall a few important facts and dates. He was born February 7, 1812; he died June 9, 1870. He began writing his "Sketches by Boz" in 1835, at the age of twenty-three, and until the day of his death, thirty-five years after, delighted and astonished the readers of two continents with thirteen elaborate works and numerous shorter stories and sketches, introducing over five hundred characters, many of whom are, indeed, Household Words.

At the age of ten he was employed in a factory, pasting labels on blacking pots at six shillings a week, undergoing experiences which would have crushed a weaker spirit, as he said in later years, with "no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God." His father was a prisoner for debt in the Marshalsea prison, and Dickens spent his Sundays there, getting the impressions which he reproduced so vividly in "Little Dorrit." At fifteen he entered the office of one Molloy, an attorney, in New Square, Lincoln's Inn, and, later, the office of Edward Blackmore, an attorney of Gray's Inn. Here he remained until November, 1828, receiving a salary of fifteen shillings a week. His experience, though short, must have been crowded. He saw the seamy side of the law, the Fleet Prison, Newgate, and the Marshalsea.

He doubtless slipped many a time into the Old Bailey and saw there tried many an Artful Dodger; that Old Bailey of which Lord Brampton says, in his "Reminiscences,' "Its associations were enough to strike a chill of horror into you. It was the very cesspool for the off scourings of humanity." And Dickens had a wonderful memory for all these things. He used to say that he remembered his old home at Portsmouth, from which he was taken when two years old. This must be true, because he said it, and he ought to know. Like a good Churchman, Credo quia

impossibile. At all events, he remembered everything worth remembering, and a great deal one would think worth forgetting, and everything he saw and heard reappeared, sometimes like a photograph, sometimes like a caricature, in his books. Then he studied shorthand, as he tells us in " David Copperfield," and reported in the Lord Chancellor's Court, then for the newspapers, then for two years he sat in Doctors' Commons, then at the age of nineteen entered the gallery," where he stayed for four years more, with quick eye and ears and nimble fingers, answering in a sense Browning's question, "What hand and brain went ever paired?"

Such was his education and preparation for his career, which then began with his "Sketches by Boz," some of which are as good as anything he wrote in later life; and in 1836, at the age of twenty-four, "Pickwick" made him immortal, and has kept the whole world on a broad grin ever since.

I have said that no criticism of Dickens would be here attempted, but one thing must be said, because everybody else has said it, and it is really true, in speaking of the law and lawyers of Dickens, that Dickens saw too keenly the humorous side of life to portray it as an artist; he was a caricaturist. Life is mirrored in his pages, but the mirror was convex or warped, and he went up and down the world, holding it before everybody and everything. He held it before his own father, and the amused world beheld the foolish figure of Mr. Micawber; he held it before his mother, and the image appeared of Mrs. Nickleby; his friend, Leigh Hunt, became Harold Skimpole; Landor was changed to Boythorn; a family friend appeared as Miss Mowcher. So, with Dickens's reproduction of manners and institutions. He was sentimental and emotional, but his sentiment too often becomes mawkish; his pathos is strained and artificial; the best of his writings are marred too often by blank verse, while the plots of his stories are frequently awkward, involved, and unnatural.

He was, as I said, sentimental and emotional; he was sympathetic also. He saw and appreciated the evils of society as they existed in his day, but he lacked the con

structive faculty of suggesting practical reforms. His ability consisted in exciting compassion for the poor and oppressed, scorn and contempt for the oppressor, and derision for the laws which, at the time he wrote, favored poverty and oppression, and were the wornout heritage of an earlier stage of society.

I repeat that in reading Dickens's description of the law and lawyers we must bear in mind that, first and last, his aim was to ridicule, satirize, and caricature all that he disliked and despised, and he saw much in the law and lawyers of England to dislike and despise. He was not, of course, an educated lawyer. I doubt very much if he ever read any law at all. He was not a reader, like Uriah Heep, whom he found "going through' Tidd's Practice,' " a great, fat book, with his lank forefinger following the lines and making tracks along the page like a snail. Dickens's knowledge was not derived from the printed page, but from what he saw and heard. He was never called to the Bar, though I believe he ate his dinners in the Middle Temple. In the guise of the "Uncommercial Traveller" Dickens says, "I was uncommercially preparing for the Bar, which is done, as everybody knows, by having a frayed old gown put on, and, so decorated, bolting a bad dinner in a party of four, whereof each individual mistrusts the other three."

Dickens's practical experience of the law was decidedly unpleasant. In 1844 Vice-Chancellor Knight Bruce granted him an injunction against some literary pirates who published imitations of "Christmas Carol" and "Chuzzlewit." Although successful, he had to pay the costs, a boomerang which he might have considered very funny had it happened to another. When another case of piracy occurred he wrote to his counsel, Talfourd: "It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the expense and anxiety and horrible injustice of the 'Carol' case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed." It was, doubtless, his own sentiments which he expressed in the "Battle of Life," which he wrote soon after.