‘bills’ in Chancery with the ‘bills of mortality’ shows that with proper management a suit need never have come to an end. There is a story for which the late Mr. Chitty is responsible, that an attorney on the marriage of his son handed him over a Chancery suit with some common law actions. A couple of years afterwards the son asked his father for some more business. ‘Why, I gave you that capital Chancery suit,’ replied his father; ‘what more can you want?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the son; ‘but I have wound up the Chancery suit and given my client great satisfaction, and he is in possession of the estate.’ ‘What, you improvident fool!’ rejoined the father indignantly. ‘That suit was in my family for twenty-five years, and would have continued so for so much longer if I had kept it. I shall not encourage such a fellow.’ As in Butler’s time it might still be said:-- So lawyers, lest the Bear defendant, And plaintiff Dog, should make an end on’t, Do stave and tail with writ of error, Reverse of judgment, and demurrer, To let them breathe awhile, and then Cry Whoop! and set them on again. In fact, like ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce,’ hundreds of suits struggled on until they expired of inanition, the costs having swallowed up the estate. Such were the inevitable delays fifty years ago, that no one could enter into a Chancery suit with the least prospect of being alive at its termination. It was no small part of the duty of the respectable members of the legal profession to keep their clients out of Chancery. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this grievance should have been made the shuttlecock of party, that personalities should have obscured it, that, instead of the system, the men who were almost as much its victims as the suitors should have been blamed. Many successive Lord Chancellors in this way came in for much undeserved obloquy. The plain truth was, they were overworked. Besides their political functions, they had to preside in the Lords over appeals from themselves, the Master of the Rolls, and the Vice-Chancellor; they had some heavy work in bankruptcy and lunacy. The number of days that could be devoted to sitting as a Chancery judge of first instance was, therefore, necessarily small. That this was the keynote of the difficulty was shown by the marked improvement which followed upon the appointment of two additional Vice-Chancellors in 1841. In that year, too, another scandal was done away with by the abolition of the Six Clerks’ office--a characteristic part of the unwieldy machine. The depositaries of the practice of the Court, the Six Clerks and their underlings, the ‘Clerks in Court,’ were responsible for much of the delay which arose. The ‘Six Clerks’ were paid by fees, and their places were worth nearly two thousand a year, for which they did practically nothing, all their duties being discharged by deputy. No one, it was said, ever saw one of the ‘Six Clerks.’ Even in their office they were not known. The Masters