CURIOSITIES OF LAW AND LAWYERS. CHAPTER I. ABOUT LAWYERS GENERALLY. HOW LAWYERS GET TO HEAVEN. There is a pleasant story of a lawyer, who, being refused entrance into heaven by St. Peter, contrived to throw his hat inside the door; and then, bei g permitted by the kind saint to go in and fetch it, took advantage of his. being fixed to his post as doorkeeper to refuse to come back again. THE LAWYER'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. Adolphus, the criminal lawyer, says that the judges in his time were much impressed with the following table of degrees. The three degrees of comparison in a lawyer's progress are: getting on; getting on-er (honour); getting on-est (honest). The judges, he says, acknowledged there was much sad truth in this jingle. THE LAWYER'S PATRON SAINT. St. Evona, or Ives, of Brittany, a famous lawyer in 1300, was lamenting that his profession had not a patron saint to look up to. The physicians had St. Luke; the champions had St. George; the artists each had one; but the lawyers had none. Thinking that the Pope ought to bestow a saint, he went to Rome, and requested his Holiness to give the lawyers of Brittany a patron. The Pope, rather puzzled, proposed to St. Evona that he should go round the church of St. John de Lateran blindfold, and after he had said so many Ave Marias, the first saint he laid hold of should be his patron; and this solution of the diffi culty the good old lawyer willingly undertook. When he had finished his Ave Marias, he stopped short, and laid his hands on the first image he came to, and cried out with joy, "This is our saint-this be our patron." But when the bandage was taken from his eyes, what was his astonishment to find, that, though he had stopped at St. Michael's altar, he had all the while laid hold, not of St. Michael, but of the figure under St. Michael's feet— the devil! This St. Evona of Brittany, it is said in Carr's account of the Netherlands, 1684, was so dejected at the choice of a patron saint, that in a few months he died, and coming to heaven's gates knocked hard. Whereupon St. Peter asked who it was that knocked so boldly. He replied that he was St. Evona the advocate. "Away, away!" said St. Peter; "here is but one advocate in heaven; here is no room for you lawyers." "Oh, but," said St. Evona, "I am that honest lawyer who never took fees on both sides, nor pleaded in a bad cause; nor did I ever set my neighbours together by the ears, nor lived by the sins of the people." "Well, then," said St. Peter, "come in!" He became the patron saint himself. This story puts one in mind of Ben Jonson going through a church in Surrey, and seeing poor people weeping over a grave, whereupon he asked one of the women why they wept. "Oh," said she, "we have lost our precious lawyer, Justice Randall. He kept us all in peace, and always was so good as to keep us from going to law-the best man that ever lived." "Well," said Ben Jonson, “I will send you an epitaph to write upon his tomb," which was God works wonders now and then : WHY LAWYERS TAKE UP BAD CASES. One of the most famous French advocates, Langlois, was asked by the President of the Parliament of Paris |