Country life -- England; England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
keeping with his old-world robes of scarlet and ermine. Well, he enters
the county town with his troop of javelin-men, his trumpeters blowing
stoutly before him. He takes up his lodgings there, and on the morning
of the judge’s approach, he marches out in the same style, followed by a
long train of the gentlemen and tradesmen of the place, who are anxious
to testify their respect to the ancient forms of justice, and the
representative of the monarch. He advances some mile or two on the way
by which the judge is to arrive. There the procession halts, generally
in a position which commands a view of the road by which the judge is
expected. Anon, there is a stir, a looking out amongst them, your eye
follows theirs, and you see a carriage, dusty and travel-soiled, come
driving rapidly on. It is that of the judge. As they drive up, the
javelin-men and gentlemen uncover; the sheriff descends from his
carriage; his gowned and bewigged lordship descends from his; the
sheriff makes his bow and his compliments; the judge enters the carriage
of the sheriff with him, his own carriage falls into the rear, and the
procession now moves on towards the town, with bannered trumpets
blowing, and amid a continually increasing crowd of spectators. There is
something very quaint and old English in the whole affair; and as I have
seen the sheriff and his train thus, waiting the approach of the judge
on some rising ground in the public road, the scene has brought back to
my imagination a feeling of the past times--simpler in heart than the
present, but more formal in manner, and perhaps fonder of solemn parade.
But the bells are ringing merrily to welcome the learned judge, and
thousands are thronging to see the sight of the sheriff and his men, and
to catch a glimpse of the judge’s wig as the coach passes, and many of
them to wonder how the sheriff can seem so much at his ease with such an
awful man: while within the strong walls of the prison, the sounds of
bells and the trampling feet of the crowds without, are causing stout
hearts and miserable hearts to tremble and feel chill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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