The question of counsel’s fees is not without some interest to laymen, as well as to those more intimately concerned. The great incomes derived from practices at the Bar are largely imaginative. The forty thousand a year of a certain very well-known practitioner was probably never more than approximated by half that sum in reality. The sixty thousand odd attributed to a leader of the Parliamentary Bar in his ordinary years was also, in all probability, half fictitious. Large fees, of course, have been known in every age. Under the Roman Republic, M. Licinius Crassus made a fortune from advocacy, which fortune, it is said, exceeded three millions sterling. He carried the reputation, however, of exacting exorbitant fees from his clients. A similar charge was made against P. Clodius and C. Curio. Cicero, too, though he boasted of his respect for the Cincian law, which prohibited the remuneration of advocates, was not without suspicion of mercenary conduct. Lord Mackenzie, who touches upon the subject, believes that he extracted a million sesterces (about £8,000) from Publius Sylla, who was under impeachment. The money was cloaked, according to the custom, as a loan, but there is no doubt it was paid in exchange for Cicero’s services as an advocate. Another Roman method of rewarding members of the Bar was by legacies left them by their clients in their wills. These bequests were looked upon with some favour. Cicero boasted that he had received in this form sums amounting to upwards of twenty millions of sesterces, which was the equivalent of about £166,666. It is interesting to note that there was a division of lawyers into a first order, of _advocati_, and into a second order, of _formularii_, under the Roman Empire. Members of the English Bar, it may be pointed out, cannot sue for fees, “although there be an express contract to pay them.” “In France, ancient laws and decisions, as well as the opinions of the doctors, allowed an action to advocates to recover their fees; but according to the later jurisprudence of the Parliament of Paris, and the actual discipline of the Bar now in force, no advocate was or is permitted to institute such an action.” (Lord Mackenzie.) So far as large fees are concerned, the £8,000 paid to Sir Thomas Wilde (afterwards Lord Truro) in the case of Small _v._ Attwood is something of a record, though it is eclipsed by the 300,000 francs received by Gerbier, the eighteenth-century French advocate, from a French colonial governor.