And the fool, entrapped by counsel’s apparent sympathy and the petty vanity clinging to all singing men to show off, actually broke forth into a rollicking drinking song, which shook the walls of the building. Thereupon counsel asked for a verdict for his client the defendant, and for costs, and got the first, if not the second. The terms barrister and counsel are often used indiscriminately; every barrister is a counsel, but not every counsel a barrister. There are barristers whose names are in everybody’s mouth, and who earn their thousands a year; there are counsel unknown to the public, who never, or only under peculiar circumstances, appear at the Bar, but who are well known to the legal profession, and make more than twice as much as the barrister practising at the Bar; they are ’consulting’ counsel. When you go to a joiner and tell him to make you a cabinet, he takes your order, and sets about making the piece of furniture you want; he does not say that, as such an article is not one he ever heard of in his trade, he will go and learn from someone more experienced than himself how to execute your order, and that you will have to pay for his improving himself in joinery. But if you go to your lawyer with a case which is not of the most usual description, he informs you that he must have counsel’s opinion, for which you have to pay from two to five guineas, to improve your lawyer’s legal knowledge. And he sends a number of questions to a ’consulting’ counsel. Now, as every lawyer of any standing has in his library all the legal handbooks and reports of cases which are the consulting counsel’s only guides, the lawyer might as well look up the precedents himself, but that would not be etiquette, nor so profitable all round, and so the more expensive method must be followed. The consulting counsel sits in his chambers as the soothsayers of old sat in their temples, whence, like them, he sends forth oracular utterances as obscure and ambiguous as those of the ancient mummers, and straightway solicitors and clients feel relieved of all anxiety: they have counsel’s opinion and their case is as good as won. For their counsel’s opinion is favourable, or, at all events, this is the interpretation they put on it, though counsel’s opinion on the same case on the other side reads the very reverse. Should it so happen that on the day in which counsel has given his opinion a case should be decided in a law-court, which shows that his opinion is not worth a rap, will counsel rush off to the lawyer to tell him so? Not he; he is not going to admit that he is fallible. And he will not give his opinion on the same case twice. A lawyer’s clerk having obtained such an opinion from counsel, and passing a pub, where he had agreed to meet a friend of his to settle a little betting transaction, left the opinion in the omnibus in which he had come, and did not discover his loss till it was too late to go to counsel again the same day.