294 HUMBUG OF THK BAR. 



your bill of costs, ' Retainer to Mr. Voluble and clerk, 1 3s. 6cl. Fee 

 to Mr. Voluble and clerk with brief, 10 10s. Refresher to Mr. Vo- 

 luble and clerk, 1 3s. 6d.' Stutter is an ass ; I wouldn't have given 

 him sixpence." But the fact is, Stutter does not get sixpence ; the 

 courtesy and liberality the honour and independence of the bar 

 alike forbid it. But then surely the honour and independence of the 

 bar does not hinder Mr. Voluble from returning the fees to his poor 

 client, who has perhaps lost his cause through his absence ? No such 

 thing custom forbids it. 



The practice at chambers is not less involved in mystery and 

 chicanery ; the opinion of an eminent counsel upon the most trifling 

 point is not to be obtained, sometimes under many months. Day after 

 day the attorney sends for the expensive desideratum. " Really Mr. 

 Serjeant so-and-so is very sorry, but he has not had time," or, Mr. 

 Serjeant so-and-so's clerk looks pompously over his list of cases 

 (perhaps three or four) and discovers that there are several yet 

 before the one required, and " it cannot be taken out of its order." 

 To heighten the joke for joke it is to all but the client the opinion 

 could, in all probability, be given just as correctly and much more 

 speedily by the attorney, but being liable by law for the conse- 

 quences of his judgment which a barrister, the only person deemed 

 legally competent to give an opinion is not the former in his own de- 

 fence, shifts the responsibility from himself to nobody. 



So much for the learning, liberality, and honour of the bar, from 

 whose members are chosen the men that are to pass judgment upon 

 our lives, our rights, and our property. Let us no more hear the 

 epithets " honourable" applied to a profession, the followers of which, 

 professing every thing that is noble and independent, torture right 

 into wrong, and wrong into right, and who, under the influence of 

 motives the most sordid and narrow, attain ends the most unjust and 

 oppressive, by means the most base and despicable. For heaven's 

 sake, let the mockery attendant upon such a profession cease ; let the 

 hire of the barristers be fixed like that of any other trade, (if its 

 parallel for plunder can be found) and give them the right to sue for 

 that without which they will not, and by a rule of their own, dare 

 not work. In return for this, let them be sued by their employers if 

 they neglect their duty ; let those who hold the brief receive the fee ; 

 we shall then have no absentees ; the fear of losing his guinea or two 

 will insure the advocate's punctuality more effectually than that of 

 losing the cause of his heart-broken client. 



NOTES BY ANOTHER HAND. 



1 . This is literally true, but figuratively a falsehood. They give attprnies 

 credit, send in their bills as regularly as bakers, and dun the dilatory without 

 remorse, not in person, but by proxy. Their lean, hungry cadaverous clerks 

 do most certainly, so far as words g( , u demand and sue for fees." It may not be 

 generally known, that by the singular machinery of the profession, a barrister's 

 clerk is paid not by his master but his master's clients. If, with a brief, you 

 give a barrister a guinea, you must give his boy half-a-crown . The clerk, 

 therefore, has a good excuse for dunning, without aspersing the sublime dig- 

 nity, the lofty elevation above all pecuniary motives or desires of his raven- 

 ous master. He, the clerk, "is so short of the needful, having no salary, that 

 he is really compelled to get in his half-crowns," but if these be offered him 



