the jury, and call another. Serjeant Bond, for the defendant, thought the best way would be to withdraw a juror. Lord Loughborough said if counsel could not agree, he did not think he had power to do anything but discharge the jury; there could be no verdict because there had been no trial. The plaintiff must therefore move the court for a new trial, and he could do so next morning.

His lordship added, that once on circuit, in a trial for felony, a juryman fell into a fit during the trial, and was dead drunk. He discharged the jury in consequence, and afterwards, on argument, the court decided he had done rightly. The above case, he said, was new, and he did not recollect that the circumstance had ever happened before.

EDUCATING SPECIAL JURYMEN.

Lord Campbell says: "Lord Mansfield did much for the improvement of the commercial law in this country, by rearing a body of special jurymen at Guildhall, who were generally returned on all commercial causes to be tried there. He was on terms of the most familiar intercourse with them, not only conversing freely with them. in court, but inviting them to dine with him. From them he learned the usages of trade, and in return he took great pains in explaining to them the principles of jurisprudence by which they were to be guided. Several of these gentlemen survived when I began to attend Guildhall as a student, and were designated and honoured as "Lord Mansfield's jurymen." One in particular, I remember, Mr. Edward Vaux, who always wore a cocked hat, and had almost as much authority as the Lord Chief Justice himself.”—2 Camp. Ch. J.J.'s, 407.

A JUDGE EXPLAINING CONSEQUENTIAL ISSUE.

Mr. Justice Burrough, of the Common Pleas, used to resort to the use of proverbs and parables in dealing with the juries. One day at nisi prius, much talk was made about a consequential issue in the case. He began to explain it to the jury thus: "Gentlemen of the jury, you have been told that the first is a consequential issue.

Now perhaps you do not know what a consequential issue means; but I daresay you understand nine pins. Well then, if you deliver your bowl so as to strike the front pin in a particular direction, down go the rest. Just so it is with these counts. Knock down the first, and all the rest will go to the ground; that's what we call a consequential issue."

A SHORT ADDRESS TO THE GRAND JURY BY THE JUDGE

Judge Foster, a short time before his death, went the Oxford Circuit, in the hottest part of one of the hottest summers ever known. He was then so far advanced in years as to be scarcely equal to the duties of his office. When the grand jury of Worcester attended him, he addressed them as follows: "Gentlemen, the weather is extremely hot, I am very old, and you are very well acquainted with what is your duty; I have no doubt but you will practise it."

A JURYMAN DEAF IN ONE EAR.

Baron Alderson was the judge to try causes, and a juryman presented himself who, being very deaf, asked the clerk who administered the oath to speak up. The judge, on inquiry, was told by the juryman that he was deaf with one ear; the judge replied, "Well then, you may leave the box, for it is necessary that jurymen should hear both sides."

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CHAPTER XIII.

ABOUT THE DEAD AND THEIR WILLS.

A JUDGE LEAVING LEGACY TO PAY THE NATIONAL DEBT.

When Sir Joseph Jekyll died, he left his fortune to pay the national debt. Lord Mansfield said: "Sir Joseph was a good man and a good lawyer, but his bequest was a very foolish one. He might as well have attempted to stop the middle arch of Blackfriars bridge with his full bottomed wig."

The will was afterwards set aside by the relatives, on the ground of imbecility.

A LAWYER PURPOSELY LEAVING HIS WILL OBSCURE.

Serjeant Maynard, the black-letter lawyer, who died in the reign of William III., is said to have left a will purposely worded in obscure terms, so as to give rise to litigation, and settle some very fine moot points which had so often vexed him in his lifetime.

LAWYERS' WILLS.

A great lawyer who had a very bad son, in his last will left him a legacy to such a value and this verse of Mr. Pope's to think often of

"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

Spence, in his "Anecdotes," thinks this was said of Lord Mansfield, but he never had a son.

Lord Chancellor Cowper, on his death-bed, ordered that his son should never travel (it is by the absolute desire of the Queen that he does). He ordered this from a great

deal of observation on its effects. He had found that there was little to be hoped and much to be feared from travelling. Atwell, who is the young lord's tutor abroad, gives but a very discouraging account of it too in his letters, and seems to think that people are sent out too young, and are too hasty to find any great good from it.-Spence's Anecdotes.

WILLS AS A SOURCE OF LITIGATION.

Lord Eldon says that when he went the Northern Circuit, the first toast at the circuit mess table after the King, was "the schoolmasters." In those days they made wills, etc., which furnished frequent employment to the lawyers.

LIBELS ON THE DEAD.

History is said to swarm with libels on the dead and the living. Nevertheless, that expression is sometimes used in the law as if the same kind of injury were possible towards the dead as towards the living, and as if the former were not yet beyond the reach of detraction and could still cry aloud for redress. This was never more than a figure of speech, indicating that sometimes the relatives of a person recently dead were treated as identified with their predecessor, and as if the inanimate clay could be deemed on such occasions to glow with anger, pride, or revenge. By the Roman law the heir was bound to protect the good name of the deceased, and any insult offered to the dead body was deemed offered to himself, and a good cause of action. Hence, when a father's statue was struck with a stone, this was an injury to the son and heir, and could be redressed by action. Our law has never gone so far as to give damages, and yet there are traces of the same right and the same wrong.

The ancient Egyptians surpassed all nations in the liberal manner in which they disposed of this difficulty; for after the death of a person, a tribunal of forty judges sat in solemn inquest to try his character for good and evil, and cast up the balance. If, upon the whole, the accusations were not proved, then his body was allowed to be buried; but if the verdict was against him, the

corpse was refused burial, and was kept as a chattel, remaining in the house of his descendants till the judgment could be reversed. Solon was thought to make a just law, that no man should be allowed to speak ill of the dead.-Paterson's Lib. Press, 155.

FINDING OUT THE MEANING OF A WILL.

Lord Alvanley, when the construction of a difficult will was involved in a suit before him, at the Rolls Court, was told by the counsel arguing the case that it was the duty of the court to find a meaning for the testator, however difficult. The judge thereupon said: "My duty to find a meaning! Suppose the will had contained only three words, Fustum funnidos tantaraboo, am I to find the meaning of this gibberish?"

THE GREAT THELLUSSON WILL CASE.

Peter Thellusson, by his will, left his immense real and personal property to trustees, that the rents and profits might accumulate during the lives of all his sons, and of all his grandchildren, that should be living at his death, and of any grandchild that should be born within the usual time of gestation after his death, to be laid out in landed estates, which were to be finally divided between the representatives of his three sons, and failing his descendants, to go to pay the national debt. His family disputed the validity of the will, on the ground that although the corpus of the property might have been rendered inalienable for a period thus limited, the rents and profits could not be so disposed of; and that it was contrary to public policy to allow such an accumulation, which might render the individual in whom the whole might centre dangerous to public liberty, and too powerful for a subject. The decree supporting the will was affirmed on an appeal to the House of Lords, but an Act of Parliament, introduced by Lord Chancellor Loughborough, was passed (39 & 40 Geo. III., c. 98), forbidding such accumulations in future for a longer period than twenty-one years. All apprehensions of the Thellusson property swelling to a magnitude dangerous to the crown