A farmer's wife jogged by on her pillion,
and hearing the wretched man exclaim that he should die of thirst, the
good creature gave him a juicy apple, and hoped that his punishment
would prove for the good of his soul. Not ten minutes, but ten hours did
the Chief Justice sit in the stocks, and when at length he was carried
into Lord Dacre's house, he was in no humor to laugh at his own
miserable plight. Not long afterwards he presided at a trial in which a
workman brought an action against a magistrate who had wrongfully placed
him in the stocks. The counsel for the defence happening to laugh at the
statement of the plaintiff, who maintained that he had suffered intense
pain during his confinement, Lord Camden leaned forwards and inquired in
a whisper, "Brother were you ever in the stocks?" "Never, my lord,"
answered the advocate, with a look of lively astonishment "I have been,"
was the whispered reply; "and let me assure you that the agony inflicted
by the stocks is--_awful_!"
Of a different sort, but scarcely less intense, was the pain endured by
Lord Mansfield whenever a barrister pronounced a Latin word with a false
quantity. "My lords," said the Scotch advocate, Crosby, at the bar of
the House of Lords, "I have the honor to appear before your lordships as
counsel for the Curators." "Ugh!" groaned the Westminster Oxford
law-lord, softening his reproof by an allusion to his Scotch
nationality, "Curators, Mr. Crosby, Curators: I wish _our_ countrymen
would pay a little more attention to prosody." "My Lord," replied Mr.
Crosby, with delightful readiness and composure, "I can assure you that
_our_ countrymen are very proud of your lordship as the greatest
senator and orator of the present age." The barrister who made Baron
Alderson shudder under his robes by applying for a 'nolle prosequi,' was
not equally quick at self-defence, when that judge interposed, "Stop,
sir--consider that this is the last day of term, and don't make things
unnecessarily long." It was Baron Alderson who, in reply to the
juryman's confession that he was deaf in one ear, observed, "Then leave
the box before the trial begins; for it is necessary that jurymen should
_hear both sides_."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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