ing deference, but there is a deference due to ourselves and to the cause of truth and justice. When HONE, in the course of his late trials, asserted that there was not a single Counsel who would venture to support his own conscientious conviction against the opinion of a presiding Judge,-I will venture to say that there was not a single Barrister present, whose hollow bosom did not echo the sentence, and silently admit its truth! How this state of things must make us long to see some gifted and high-hearted spirit rise from among the submissive crowd of wigs and gowns, to vindicate his profession, and prove that a great respect and veneration for the Judges of the land is consistent with a greater respect and veneration for his own independence of mind, and for the sacred principles of truth and impartiality! MR. SCARLETT. Omnibus enim rebus is, qui princeps in agendo est, ornatissimus et paratissimus esse debet.Cic. in Q. Cæcilium. An excellent writer has said, that "eloquence is the common child of freedom and knowledge;"* and the remark is verified, if verification were needed, by the present state of the English Bar, as I endeavoured to shew in the preceding introductory article, where, among other causes of the decline of oratory in our courts of justice, two are principally rested upon the absence of nearly all indepence of mind, and the confinement of knowledge almost to the mechanism and drudgery of the profession. In a soil so cold and shallow, eloquence can never flourish; it can never strike wide and deep the spreading roots *Wynne's Eunomus, through which it must draw its nourishment; or if by any accident a seed should fall upon better ground, it can never attain luxuriance or perfection, if the blossoms and burgeons are so unmercifully cropped and clipped by the hand of self-sufficient authority. If, for the sake of impartiality, it be admitted that efforts to break through the trammels are sometimes repressed by Lord Ellenborough, because he revolts at any attempt to impose upon the good sense of a jury, it must also be allowed, that it is at least very questionable whether such interference be a part of the province and duties of a judge; whether one man has a right to assume that he sees more clearly than twelve others, whose understandings he is to take under his protection? But setting aside that point, it ought at least to be recollected, that though one individual may be gifted with extraordinary penetration, it does not follow, that his eleven brethren of the Bench possess the same faculty and in the same degree: indeed the contrary in most instances must be the fact; and supposing that the ends of justice are not often defeated by Lord Ellenborough's precipitation, by other judges she may be made a cruel instrument of oppression, because they may think fit to pursue a system of servile and contemptible imitation. Yet the submissiveness, the crouching acquiescence, the want of independence of mind, so generally deplored, and which has led nearly to the total disuse of Advocates in political and party prosecutions, is not confined merely to the Court of King's Bench, where the Lord Chief Justice presides-the system of imitation extends to the Counsel as well as to the Court; and if the deference be not in all the Courts quite so humiliating, it only arises from the circumstance, that there, indictments for libels upon the government or officers of state are not heard. If however the venue, as it is called, be laid in the country, and not subsequently changed, the case is tried at the assizes before the judge who may happen to go that circuit; besides, any barrister in any of the courts may be heard in the King's Bench, if he will venture to take a brief on a party question, or if a defendent |