[11] A counsel, attorney, or solicitor, will in no case be permitted, even if he should be willing to do so, to divulge any matter which has been communicated to him in professional confidence. This is not his privilege, but the privilege of the client, and none but the client can waive it. Jenkinson _v._ The State, 5 Blackford, 465; Benjamin _v._ Coventry, 19 Wendell, 353; Parker _v._ Carter, 4 Munf. 273; Wilson _v._ Troup, 7 Johns. Ch. Rep. 25; Crosby _v._ Berger, 11 Paige, 377; Bank of Utica _v._ Mersereau, 3 Barbour Ch. Rep. 528; Aiken _v._ Kilburne, 27 Maine, 252; Crisler _v._ Garland, 11 Smedes & Marshall, 136; Chew _v._ The Farmers' Bank of Maryland, 2 Maryland Ch. Decis. 231. It will be found in some of these cases that though the counsel declined to be engaged for the client, yet the facts communicated were held confidential; the only exception recognized being where a purpose to perpetrate _in futuro_ a felony or an action _malum in se_ was disclosed. Bank of Utica _v._ Mersereau, 3 Barbour Ch. Rep. 377. In Moore _v._ Bray, 10 Barr, 519, it was held that communications of the object, for which an assignment of a mortgage was made, to a counsel concerned for the assignee, were privileged; although no question then arose as to the object of the assignment, and the counsel considered the communication in the light of a casual conversation. "The circle of protection," said Bell, J., "is not so narrow as to exclude communications a professional person may deem unimportant to the controversy, or the briefest and lightest talk the client may choose to indulge with his legal adviser, provided he regards him as such at the moment. To found a distinction on such a ground would be to measure the safety of the confiding party by the extent of his intelligence and knowledge, and to expose to betrayal those very anxieties, which prompt those in difficulty, to seek the ear of him in whom they trust in season and out of season." [12] Burnet's Life of Hale, 1 Hale's Works, 59, 60. "He began," says Lord Campbell, "with the specious but impracticable rule of never pleading except on the right side, which would make the counsel to decide without knowing either facts or law, and would put an end to the administration of justice." 1 Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices, 412. There is the following curious note by Baxter in Burnet's Life of Hale. "And indeed Judge Hale would tell me that Bishop Usher was much prejudiced against lawyers because the worst causes find their advocates; but that he and Mr. Selden had convinced him of the reasons of it to his satisfaction; and that he did by acquaintance with them believe that there were as many honest men among lawyers, proportionably, as among any profession of men in England (not excepting bishops or divines)." 1 Hale's Works, 106. [13] 2 Wynne's Eunomus, 557.