IT

is a distinct experience, the first time you go to an English court of law. In the first place, you have the feeling that you should have prepared for the visit by going to a costumer's and hiring a fancy dresssomething not too dazzling, but unique, and as far as possible from what you ordinarily wear. This seems to be the principle on which every one that is, every man who has anything to do with the court is dressed, with the result that you see them arrayed in a choice assortment of black silk tea-gowns and black alpaca Mother Hubbards. They do not call them that, but in the dressmaking department of your intellect you know that is what they really are, and resolve to borrow one for a pattern.

Not content with tea-gowns only, the court shows a distinctly feminine inclination in its style of hair-dressing. They are frankly and obviously wigs that you see wigs dressed after a most ladylike fashion, with nice little side puffs, such as our grandmothers used to put combs in to keep in place. The "back hair," too, is a distinct feature. What with their tea-gowns and their hair, and their smooth faces, and their brilliant and enduring capacity for talk, an assemblage of English lawyers is, at first view, not unlike a session of a woman's club, or a Dorcas society that has forgotten to bring its work along.

It occurs to you what an unintentional, and therefore sincere, compliment is paid to us women when law, the most intellectual of the professions, chooses as its established and authorized costume one that comes nearer to a woman's dress than any other that men wear. It has the outward appearance, at least, of an acknowledgment that they do their best thinking when they make themselves as much like us as they can.

In an

It is almost time for court to open, but you are not to suppose that it begins without any ado, as is the case at home. American court the judge walks in clad in ordinary clothes, hangs up his hat, sits down, mostly on his shoulder-blades, the lawyers present stop smoking for a moment and crowd inside the rail to catch his Honor's eye, and the successful one, one hand in his pocket and the other ready to pound the table with, proceeds to instruct the judge as to what is and is not law, and the lawyer on the other side as to what is and is not admissible evidence.

All of which is not the English mode. Etiquette, if not law, directs in which particular little pew the barrister for each side must sit, backed up by his solicitors, and these parties of the first and second parts arrive with leather valises of a set and established pattern which, under certain circumstances, they may carry themselves; under certain or other circumstances they must have carried for them. Sub-officials of the court lay cold sliced law, in the shape of documents and books, ready to hand. Solicitors, who are a brand of lawyers that know law but don't practise it, apparently because they haven't any tea-gowns yet, make haste to tell their counsel - who are lawyers that practise law but don't know it until they are told it — what has been found out about this particular case since the last conference. Clerks— you must pronounce it with a broad "a," or people will think you are so ignorant that you don't know how to spell it-— well, clerks come in with bags, called green bags, for the reason that they are invariably either blue or red. They look so like laundry bags that you send soiled linen in to the wash that when you find that this is a divorce court,

and that these bags contain the documents relating to the cases, you at once realize both the origin and the force of the saying about washing dirty linen in public.

Someone a blasé-looking man in a dress. like a stunted polonaise says something unintelligible to the audience, but they evidently know what he intends to say, and every one immediately gets up; all but you, who are so busy with your eyes that you forget your feet. Someone nudges you, and you rise, thereby not only showing respect to the representative of the Queen - if you did not you could be fined- but getting a very good view of the personages of the small but imposing procession emerging from the curtains. behind the judge's chair. Enter, first, a sort of human preface in the shape of a macebearer. Generally speaking, judges even in England the Elaborate do not have macebearers, but this particular one has set up one pretty much as another man would set up a coach or a new doctrine in religion - by way of being a swell and different from his fellows. And the mace, too, is different from its fellows; others that you have seen are like bludgeons, this one is shaped like a stunted oar.

And now enter the judge, evidently a picturesque-minded person, for his tea-gown is red, with a sash around the place where his waist would be if he had one. His sleeves are turned back with grey, and you imagine that it is to keep them clean, but it is not. In law, the obvious reason is never the actual reason. Those grey sleeve-protectors are mourning; they were put on when somebody royal died - George the Third, as likely as not - and as the powers that be have not said that they were to be taken off, the judge keeps on being sorry, from his elbows down.

His lordship comes in; every one bows profoundly, and he returns it by a complicated movement made up of one part bow, one part a sidling walk, for he is ushering in, not the Prince of Wales, nor Li Hung Chang,

as you might expect from his manner, but American Law in the person of Morton of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Your pride rises within you, for it is written all over Morton's face and figure and clothes. that he is an American and a gentleman and a scholar. You wish that they would find many more just like him, and induce them all to come over here as an offset to the common or garden American, that is as a plague of thistles at about this time of

year.

There he sits on the bench beside the judge, guiltless of slouch, his clothes well brushed, his mouth well shut, showing more intelligence by the way he listens than most people do by the way they talk. So marked is his personality and also the distinction which is being accorded him by his lordship, that every one asks who he is, and it delights your very soul to know that this credit to his country and himself is an American.

Meantime the case has begun, and a mixed affair it is. An American barrister, representing an official in China, is petitioning an English judge for a divorce in which an East Indian is involved, with the result that besides the law of divorce there enter questions of geography, domicile, jurisdiction, free ports of entry, and sundry minor entangling considerations.

As soon as you find it is a divorce case you retire, not having provided yourself with a mental disinfectant. Candidly you do so reluctantly, for he of the red gown is the famous Sir Francis Jeune, and the American barrister is Newton Crane, who had his first case at the English bar before this same Sir Francis. You would like to see how the two nationalities hit it off together; but friendship plus patriotism, even of the Star-Spangled Banner sort, is inadequate to carry you through the hearing of a divorce case in an English court. So you go to the next room and there learn some disconnected but interesting facts. One is that the judge is wearing a red gown because

it is the eve of St. Somebody's Day: not the anniversary itself, but its eve.

Then you watch them try an Admiralty case. With sweet inconsequence they group together those three unrelated classes of cases, admiralty, probate, and divorce. You discover that under the disguise of Law some more tea-gowns, aided by two gentlemen in uniform (that is where the Admiralty part comes in), are conducting a middle aged kindergarten, toys and all.

Before the judge's bench is a counter with the points of the compass marked on it, and they pretend that this is the sea or river they are talking about. Then there is a box full of toy boats ready, and as the barrister presents his case he puts up one little boat to represent the vessel that was run into, then

dives down and gets another and sets it up to represent the one that ran into it. Everything is made beautifully clear until the opposing counsel produces eight more boats, to represent vessels anchored in the vicinity. Then the gentlemen in uniform and the judge ask a confusing lot of questions, and then a plain, everyday sailor man with an impossible accent comes forward as a witness, and turns all the boats around, adds five more to the fleet, and talks about "nor'-nor'-east by north." Just as you begin to think it is a slow kind of game after all, word is brought you that Sir Francis Jeune has decided the divorce case; that the American barrister has won, of course; that, as nearly as you can find out, everybody is divorced from everybody else, and that they all lived happily ever after. Ex.

SPE

PECIAL pleading was the science of precision. Like other sciences only to be acquired by hard study and close thinking, it had its evils. The skillful special pleader had advantages over his unlearned adversary which did not always promote justice. Its chief value was reflective. It gave the legal mind a training of which it is now deprived. The old lawyers were its friends, and there were few of them who could be enlisted in the crusade against it in the days when codification was young.

This once valued science has disappeared and scarcely left a sign. Gould and Chitty, once as much studied as Blackstone, have been laid away on the top shelves of our law libraries, behind scores of frothy state reports, valuable chiefly for their calf binding. Its great history has had no histo

rian. The antiquary who would know something of that history, must gather it, here a little and there a little, from the multitudinous volumes of its cotemporary law reports. When in the coming years, some member of our profession, of studious habits and unusual application, shall be impelled by his love or respect for the past to write upon the subject, his sketches will have none but a historical value interesting for the same reason as the article of Mr. Westley, on the "Quaint laws of Howel Dda."

When such a student of the past encounters the volumes comprising the litigation of Torrey v. Field, one branch of which has been discussed in these Reminiscences, he will not only find one of the very best examples of special pleading, illustrating its value, but also a singularly sensational history.

The following sketch of that history may prove interesting to lawyers, who, if they wish to know more of it, will find its details in the seventh, tenth, twelfth and thirteenth volumes of the Vermont Reports.

On the 15th of October, 1832, Roswell M. Field, a young lawyer of Newfane, Vermont, carried away from a ladies' seminary in that vicinity a rather mature schoolgirl, named Mary Almira Phelps. The pursuit of the young couple was immediate and very hot. It did not overtake them in time to prevent the legal ceremony of their marriage, but they were overtaken, and the bride was either compelled or persuaded to return to her school, before the consummation of the marriage by cohabitation. Failing to secure the person of his bride, the nominal husband determined to go after her property, which he claimed had been fraudulently absorbed by the mother of the bride from the estate of her father, claiming to be his wife when she was only his mistress. Field commenced an action by the remarkable bill in chancery described in my former article, and caused the entire bill, with its extremely unpleasant details, to be published in the local newspaper.

This publication created an intense excitement in the rural community where the bride and her family lived. Mrs. Torrey, the bride's mother, immediately commenced an action against Field, alleging that the publication was libellous, and demanding in damages ten thousand dollars. Such was the origin of the cause célèbre of Torrey v. Field.

As soon as the writ and declaration were served upon him the young attorney retired into the privacy of his bachelor apartments and there evolved from his inner consciousness his defense to the action. He prepared ten special pleas in bar. One of them, bearing the number three, alleged the pendency of the bill in chancery, the order of the chancellor for the publication of the notice, and the publication pursuant to the

order. Each of the nine others justified the publication in whole or in part upon a variety of grounds. The substantial defense asserted was that the facts stated in the pleas were true, or were by the defendant believed to be true upon due enquiry.

Until he had tried the experiment no pleader could appreciate the questions raised by these ten pleas. It was necessary to consider each one per se, and to decide whether it was in law an answer to that portion of the alleged libel which it professed If it was, it must be traversed

to answer. or denied, if it was not, it must be demurred to for insufficiency. In every case there was the risk that the Court would not agree with the pleader. Finally, after much. consultation, the counsel for the plaintiff entered the snare which the pleader had set for them, and demurred to each one of the ten special pleas. In such a case, if any one of the ten pleas was held to be a good answer to the whole declaration, there must be a judgment for the defendant, no matter if the remaining nine pleas were worthless.

The County Court decided that several of the pleas were good and gave judgment for the defendant, and the case went to the Supreme Court upon exceptions.

There have been few American appellate courts with judges whose legal learning was superior to that of those who held the February term, 1838, of the Vermont Supreme Court in Windsor County. It is quite sufficient to give their names, for all of them acquired national reputations. They were Charles H. Williams, Chief Justice; Stephen Royce, Samuel S. Phelps and Isaac F. Redfield, associate justices. The opinion in the case under consideration was written by Judge Redfield. As an illustration of the principles of special pleading, to define the issues of fact to be decided by a jury in a complicated case, the opinion was a masterpiece. The first and second pleas were held good as far as they went, but they attempted to justify matters of inducement, only, and

not the substance of the libel. The third plea, which simply justified the publication under the chancellor's order, was held to be a good answer to the declaration. The seven remaining pleas were held to be bad on different grounds, not necessary to enumerate here.

But although the third plea was held to be, prima facie, a good answer to the declaration, it by no means followed that a party could make use of such an order to justify a malicious and unnecessary libel. Was the publication in this case warranted by the practice of reputable solicitors? Was so extended a publication by such solicitors deemed necessary to give a proper notice? These were questions of fact to be determined by the jury. It was claimed to be the practice of reputable solicitors to publish only a concise statement of the substance of the bill. If such was the practice, and the defendant had exceeded it, he was liable for the excess if it was libelous. Whether there was such an excess was the issue finally left to the jury. After a spirited trial the jury found that the publication was unnecessarily diffuse, and that the surplusage was false and libelous. They returned a verdict for the plaintiff dollar!

damages one

This verdict appears to have been acquiesced in by all the parties, neither of whom could have claimed the victory. The character of the plaintiff could not have stood very high, if it could only be damaged by such a libel to the extent of one dollar; and the jury must have considered that the defendant had a moral if not a legal justification, or they would have mulcted him in heavier damages.

If any are desirous of following this litigation into all its details, they may consult the seventh volume of Vermont Reports, p. 372, tenth ib. pp. 321-353; twelfth ib. 485, and thirteenth ib. 460.

The recent death of Eugene Field, beloved of so many children, will lead many

to desire to know the subsequent history of the parties to this extraordinary litigation. The attempted marriage of Roswell M. Field to Mary Almira Phelps took place in Putney, Vt., on the 15th of October 1832. She was at that time engaged to be married to one Jeremiah Clark. Forty-three days after the Putney ceremony, and without waiting to have it declared invalid, as it was afterwards on the ground that there had been no cohabitation, Miss Phelps and Clark were married. Clark survived the marriage but a few years, when he died, leaving Mary Almira a widow.

In June, 1839, Roswell M. Field left Vermont and took up his residence in St. Louis, Missouri, where he rapidly rose to eminence in his profession, and became one of the leaders of the Bar. He was the inventor of the famous Dred Scott case, and conducted it in all the lower courts, where it was so managed as to present the important questions afterwards so much discussed and so fully decided in the Supreme Court of the United States.

In the year 1839, Miss Phelps, then the widow Clark, followed Mr. Field to St. Louis and offered to renew their former intimacy. Mr. Field had had quite enough. of her family, and sternly refused to hold. any communication with her. Her ultimate experiences are unknown to the writer.

In St. Louis Mr. Field appears to have been engrossed in his profession, and although of fine address and popular manners took no interest in politics. For almost ten years, little is known touching his domestic life. On the 30th of May, 1848, he married Miss Frances Reed of Dummerston, Vermont. It is praise enough for any wife to say of her, as all who knew her say of Mrs. Roswell Field, that she was a typical Vermont woman. The fruit of this marriage was two sons, Eugene, born Sept. 3, 1850, and Roswell M., junior, born Sept. 1, 1851. Five years after the birth of her youngest son, Mrs. Field died. The death of a New