Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/515

468 gal pictures in such well-known novels as Reade's "Very Hard Cash" and "Griffith Gaunt," with their entertaining passages on pleadings and their crisp and clever examinations of witnesses, more possible in fiction than in reality. Note was also made of Dickens's "Bleak House," with its over-familiar chancery case, and of his "Pickwick," with its laughable satire on trial by jury, and its series of sketches which we may possibly deem even more lifelike if we credit the story just published, that the original hero of the tale appeared in court the other day. Mention was not made, however, of "Great Expectations," with its convict will-maker standing behind the melodramatic spinster, and its most penetrating of lawyers, the inimitable Jaggers.

But an instance of the first class was noted which is of greater interest in the present connection. This is the plot of Trollope's "Orley Farm," a novel which is praised as giving, in cabinet-painting style, all varieties of the profession in court and out. The story turns on the validity of a codicil which proves to have been forged by the second wife of the testator. It cuts off the son by the first wife, and leaves the farm to the son by the second wife. It is in the handwriting of the widow, witnessed by an attorney whose daughter received a handsome legacy and also by a clerk and a maidservant. The widow swears that she drew up the codicil at the attorney's dictation in her husband's hearing, because the latter had the gout, and that she had seen all parties sign it. The witnesses give evidence in favor of the due execution of the codicil. Testimony is heard, it is true, which would hardly be admitted in a court of law, but the will thus amended is admitted to probate. But it afterwards appears that the names of the same witnesses appeared on a deed of separation of partnership, of the same date as the supposed codicil; and as they all testified that they witnessed but one paper on that day, the charming widow is found guilty of perjury. Of course the trial gives the fullest scope for the detailed art of the author.

It would be interesting to bridge over the period of nearly a quarter of a century since this review of law in fiction was written, and merely to survey the notable novels in which the story hinges upon the execution or validity of wills. But there is room here for little more than an outline of a recent novel of unique features in this regard. In "Mr. Meeson's Will," the popular Rider Haggard has turned from accounts of age-defying, smiling-eyed goddesses of beauty, passing through the centuries until the dazzling form shrivels to a mummy in the fire, and of frowning cities, and hot-potting savages, and mythical mines, and strange blossoms of ostrich-land, to tell us of a fiendish publisher and a lone island and a tattooed will. It is the particular delight of this issuer of books, though he largely sends forth works of a religious cast, to crush all the originality out of his authors and turn them into literary hacks, so that they may become dreary drudges in his vast establishment, sinking even their names in numbers, and losing every atom of individuality and every symptom of spirit. Of course he makes a shamelessly cruel contract with the heroine, who writes novels; and the hero, his nephew, protests and is driven out of the concern. But he is driven into love with the reciprocating maker of manuscript. Then the heroine embarks for distant lands; and it happens, to the great good fortune of the inventor of the story, that the publisher sails on board the same vessel. The vessel is wrecked, and these two chance to be cast on a desert island, where they manage to get along after the style of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Foul Play," with variations. But the heavy villain of a publisher is all upset in body and mind by these experiences, and he dies to slow music, pursued by raging furies in the form of ghastly visions of the suffering authors he has driven to desperation and harassed into poverty-stricken nonentities.

Yet these very visions make him see the