"Perhaps you will take Mr. Pickwick away," said the Serjeant, "and--and--and--hear anything Mr. Pickwick may wish to communicate. We shall have a consultation, of course." With this hint that he had been interrupted quite long enough, Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, who had been gradually growing more and more abstracted, applied his glass to his eye for an instant, bowed slightly round, and was once more deeply immersed in the case before him, which arose out of an interminable law-suit originating in the act of an individual, deceased a century or so ago, who had stopped up a pathway leading from some place which nobody ever came from to some other place which nobody ever went to. Mr. Phunky would not hear of passing through any door until Mr. Pickwick and his solicitor had passed through before him, so it was some time before they got into the Square; and when they did reach it they walked up and down, and held a long conference, the result of which was that it was a very difficult matter to say how the verdict would go; that nobody could presume to calculate on the issue of an action; that it was very lucky they had prevented the other party from getting Serjeant Snubbin; and other topics of doubt and consolation common in such a position of affairs. Mr. Pickwick's lawsuit was to be tried in the Court of Common Pleas, a division in which Serjeants-at-Law had the exclusive right to practise. At this time, 1827, and indeed up till 1873, every common law judge was turned into a Serjeant, if he were not one ere he was promoted to the Bench. It was a solemn kind of ceremony. The subject of the operation was led out of the precincts of the Inns of Court; the church bell tolled as for one dead. He was then admitted member of Serjeants' Inn; and the judge would address the Serjeants who practised before him as Brother So-and-So. Justice Lindley was the last judge who took the degree, a degree the only outward visible sign of which is the black patch or coif which is attached to the top of the wig. I do not know what kind of counsel Serjeant Snubbin, retained by Mr. Perker for the defendant, was; but Dodson and Fogg had retained Serjeant Buzfuz for the plaintiff, and we all know that Serjeant Snubbin was no match for Serjeant Buzfuz. It has been objected by a writer in _Fraser's Magazine_, to the account of this trial, that it is full of inconsistencies. Serjeant Buzfuz' case, he says, was absurd, and that he would not have been able to browbeat any witness, and that no jury could have given a verdict on such evidence. This criticism resembles many other criticisms of Pickwick. Had the description in Pickwick been intended as a serious picture of the proceedings in a court of justice, it would have been open to much serious dissection and examination.