Aristotle's
Rhetoric
," interposed Lord Tenterden. The advocate shifted his ground and took up, as he thought, a safe position. "It is laid down in the
Pandects
of Justinian—." "Where are you got now?" "It is a principle of the civil law—." "Oh sir," exclaimed the judge, with a tone and voice which abundantly justified his assertion, "we have nothing to do with the
civil
law in this Court."
Judges sometimes stray into humour without intending it. At an election petition trial one allegation was, that a number of rosettes, or "marks of distinction," had been kept in a table drawer in the central committee-room. To meet this charge it was thought desirable to call witnesses to swear that the
only table in the room consisted of planks laid on trestles. "So that the table had no proper legs," said counsel cheerfully. "Never mind whether it had proper legs," said one of the learned judges. "The more important question is: Had it drawers?"
And in
The Story of Crime
the author recalls an instance of a judge unconsciously furnishing material for laughter in Court. "At the beginning of the session at the Old Baily a good deal of work is got through by the judge who takes the small cases, and it may be this fact that accounted for the confusion of thought which he describes. One of the prisoners was charged with stealing a camera, and after all the evidence had been taken his lordship proceeded to sum up to the jury. He began by correctly describing the stolen article as a camera, but had not gone very far before the camera had become a concertina, and by the time he had finished the concertina had become an accordion. And he never once saw his mistake. The usher noticed it at the first trip, and kept repeating in a kind of hoarse stage-whisper, 'Camera! Camera!' but his voice did not reach the Bench, and so the complicated article remained on record."
Mr. Andrews in his book,
The Lawyer in History, Literature, and Humour
, relates that a leader of the Bar on rising to
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