or even weeks; to observe the symptoms of a patient, and to write a prescription, can be always accomplished within the limits of a short morning call. In all times, however, the legal profession has adopted certain scales of payment-that fixed the minimum of remuneration, but left the advocate free to get more, as circumstances might encourage him to raise his demands. Of the many good stories told of artifices by which barristers have delicately intimated their desire for higher payment, none is better than an anecdote recorded of Sergeant Hill. A troublesome case being laid before this most erudite of George III.'s sergeants, he returned it with a brief note, that he "saw more difficulty in the case than, under all the circumstances, he could well solve." As the fee marked upon the case was only a guinea, the attorney readily inferred that its smallness was one of the circumstances which occasioned the counsel's difficulty. The case, therefore, was returned, with a fee of two guineas. Still dissatisfied, Sergeant Hill wrote that "he saw no reason to change his opinion.” By the etiquette of the bar no barrister is permitted to take a brief on any circuit, save that on which he habitually practises, unless he has received a special retainer; and no wearer of silk can be specially retained with a less fee than three hundred guineas. Erskine's first special retainer was in the Dean of St. Asaph's case, his first speech in which memorable cause was delivered when he had been called to the bar but little more than five years. From that time till his elevation to the bench he received on an average twelve special retainers a year, by which at the minimum of payment he made £3600 per annum. Besides being lucrative and honorable, this special employment greatly augmented his practice in Westminster Hall, as it brought him in personal contact with attorneys in every part of the country, and heightened his popularity amongst all classes of his fellow-countrymen. In 1786 he entirely withdrew from ordinary circuit practice, and confined his exertions in provincial courts to the causes for which he was specially retained. No advocate since his time has received an equal number of special retainers; and if he did not originate the custom of special retainers,* he was the first English barrister who ventured to reject all other briefs. There is no need to recapitulate all the circumstances of Erskine's rapid rise in his profession—a rise due to his effective brilliance and fervor in political trial: but this chapter on lawyers' fees would be culpably incomplete, if it failed to notice some of its pecuniary consequences. In the eighth month after his call to the bar he thanked Admiral Keppel for a splendid fee of one thousand pounds. A few years later a legal gossip wrote: "Everybody says that Erskine will be Solicitor General, and if he is, and indeed whether he is or not, he will have had the most rapid rise that has been known at the bar. It is four years and a half since he was called, and in that time he has cleared £8000 or £9000, besides paying his debts-got a silk gown, and business of at least £3000 a year-a seat in Parliament—and, over and above, has made his brother Lord Advocate." Merely to mention large fees without specifying the work by which they were earned would mislead the reader. During the railway mania of 1845, the few leaders of the parliamentary bar received prodigious fees; and in some cases the sums were paid for very little exertion. Frequently it happened that a lawyer took heavy fees in *Lord Campbell observes : "Some say that special retainers began with Erskine; but I doubt the fact." It is strange that there should be uncertainy as to the time when special retainers-unquestionably a comparatively recent innovation in legal practice-came into vogue. causes, at no stage of which he either made a speech or read a paper in the service of his too liberal employers. During that period of mad speculation the committeerooms of the two Houses were an El Dorado to certain favored lawyers, who were alternately paid for speech and silence with reckless profusion. But the time was so exceptional, that the fees received and the fortunes made in it by a score of lucky advocates and solicitors cannot be fairly cited as facts illustrating the social condition of legal practitioners. As a general rule, it may be stated that large fortunes are not made at the bar by large fees. Our richest lawyers have made the bulk of their wealth by accumulating sufficient but not exorbitant payments. In most cases the large fee has not been a very liberal remuneration for the work done. Edward Law's retainer for the defence of Warren Hastings brought with it £500 -a sum which caused our grandfathers to raise their hands in astonishment at the nabob's munificence; but the sum was in reality the reverse of liberal. In all, Warren Hastings paid his leading advocate considerably less than four thousand pounds; and if Law had not contrived to win the respect of solicitors by his management of the defence, the case could not be said to have paid him for his trouble. So also the eminent advocate, who in the great case of Small v. Attwood received a fee of £6000, was actually underpaid. When he made up the account of the special outlay necessitated by that cause, and the value of business which the burdensome case compelled him to decline, he had small reason to congratulate himself on his remuneration. A statement of the incomes made by chamber-barristers, and of the sums realized by counsel in departments of the profession that do not invite the attention of the general public, would astonish those uninformed persons who estimate the success of a barrister by the frequency with which his name appears in the newspaper reports of trials and suits. The talkers of the bar enjoy more éclat than the barristers who confine themselves to chamber practice, and their labors lead to the honors of the bench; but a young lawyer, bent only on the acquisition of wealth, is more likely to achieve his ambition by conveyancing or arbitration-business than by court-work. Kenyon was never a popular or successful advocate, but he made £3000 a year by answering cases. Charles Abbott at no time of his life could speak better than a vestryman of average ability; but by drawing informations and indictments, by writing opinions on cases, he made the greater part of the eight thousand pounds which he returned as the amount of his professional receipts in 1807. In our own time, when that popular common law advocate, Mr. Edwin James, was omnipotent with juries, his income never equalled the incomes of certain chamber-practitioners whose names are utterly unknown to the general body of English society. CHAPTER XIV. JUDICIAL CORRUPTION. O a young student making his first researches beneath the surface of English history, few facts are more painful and perplexing than the judicial corruption which prevailed in every period of our country's growth until quiet, recent times-darkening the brightest pages of our annals, and disfiguring some of the greatest chieftains of Our race. Where he narrates the fall and punishment of De Weyland towards the close of the thirteenth century, Speed observes: "While the Jews by their cruel usuries had in one way eaten up the people, the justiciars, like another kind of Jews, had ruined them with delay in their suits, and enriched themselves with wicked convictions." Of judicial corruption in the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. a vivid picture is given in a political ballad, composed in the time of one or the other of those monarchs. Of this poem Mr. Wright, in his 'Political Songs,' gives a free version, a part of which runs thus: “Judges there are whom gifts and favorites control, Content to serve the devil alone and take from him a toll; "Such judges have accomplices whom frequently they send "The clerks who sit beneath the judge are open-mouthed as he, As if they were half-famished and gaping for a fee; Of those who give no money they soon pronounce the state, "If comes some noble lady, in beauty and in pride, With golden horns upon her head, her suit he'll soon decide; "But worse than all, within the court we some relators meet, "The sheriff's hard upon the poor who cannot pay for rest, "They enter any private house, or abbey that they choose, Where meat and drink and all things else are given as their dues; And after dinner jewels too, or this were all in vain, Bedels and garçons must receive, and all that form the train. |