Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/549

 16. BOWEN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 535 where the principal ecclesiastical proceedings were held, and a body of advocates and proctors enjoyed in it a monopoly by which the general profession was excluded from audience and practice. All judges and officers of the spiritual courts were appointed by the prelates, and the other functionaries over whose tribunals they presided. They were sometimes lawyers of position, sometimes lawyers of no position at all, sometimes clergymen, and were usually paid by fees. Many offices were granted in succession and reversion, deputies discharging the duties, of which the emoluments were con- siderable. The inefficiency of the judges, the variations of practice and procedure, the expense, the delay, the fre- quently inconsistent and mistaken views of law and of fact adopted by the different authorities, the anachronism of a system which permitted civil rights to be decided by judges not appointed by, nor responsible to, the Crown, and, finally, a general sense that these tribunals were a soil in which abuses grew and flourished, rendered their fall inevitable. The flavour, the air, the humorous absurdity of many abuses in many branches of the law have been preserved to us by the pen of Charles Dickens. Writers of sentimental fiction not unfrequently exercise their powers of sarcasm on the subject of the enormities of law by inventing for the law courts an imaginary procedure which never yet was seen, and then denouncing its iniquities. But the caricatures of English law, at the beginning of the reign, which Dickens has made immortal, are full of the insight of a great artist — come direct from the brain of one who has sat in court and watched — represent real scenes and incidents as they might well appear to the uninitiated in the " gallery." His pictures of the Chancery suit of " Jarndyce and Jarndyce ; " of the common jury trial of " Bardell v. Pickwick; " of the debtors' prison, of the beadle, of the constable, of the local justice and of the local justice's clerk, contain genuine his- tory, even if it is buried under some extravagance. In " David Copperfield " he has sketched with his usual felicity the fraternity of Doctors' Commons and the ecclesiastical officials who thronged its purlieus. Like so many other of the antiquated subjects of his satire. Doctors' Commons was soon