Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/635

 598

THE LEGAL COUGH. TT is probably owing to the whirl and bustle of the age that no observer has yet found time to give the world a glimmer of light on the nature and possibilities of that artistic malady which may be termed the legal cough. It is an artistic malady in that it is not nat ural, but is the sweet perfection of a cough affected for professional purposes, and nursed and practised through patient stages of de velopment, until rounded off to a rosy love liness that virtually makes the lawyer a virtuoso. A lawyer without a cough is like a mincepie without brandy. No matter how pro found his knowledge may be, he is only fit for searching titles and doing the routine work of the office. His partner, with a very lim ited stock of legal information, will easily eclipse him before a jury, providing, of course, his cough is in good working order. When he pauses to clear his throat, he is really taking time to look ahead for new arguments and similes with which to clear his client. And when he says, " If your honor please, bow, wow, wow! " he is re garded by the jury as a scholar of sublime dignity, especially if he has bushy white hair, a clean shaven face, and a monumental jowl whose purplish festoons of chin rest in tremulous agitation between the white wings of a New England dicky. Against such a creature what chance would a pale thin man, with a red goatee and no magnetism, have? Even with a good case and the choicest flowers of oratory, he would be laughed, or rather coughed, out of court. He would only have the ghost of a chance during the winter, when, by wearing summer underclothing and broken boots, he might practise in the enjoyment of a cough that would last during the entire season. It is not known to be a fact, but it is fair to assume, that our finest coughing lawyers spend an hour or two before going to court in coughing exercises and Etudes, going grace

fully from the wild impassioned cough of scorn to the rippling dimpled cough of fun, and so on to the sentimental choking cough of pathos, so effective when he points to the innocent assassin, and then to the latter's deeply veiled anxious wife, who sits beside him, clasping the smiling babe, borrowed foi the occasion. In spite of the fact that it may be imper tinent, we feel it our duty to point out to the various law schools the importance of intro ducing this feature into the regular course of study. The old professors would be aston ished beyond measure at the effect the cough attachment would give to Roman law. They should look to it that as much time and at tention be given to coughing as to lecturing. Let them in the first year teach only the gentle rippling cough that means time for reflection, and then the pleasant cough, fol lowed by a sunny smile, intended as an en dorsement of the argument, and so on up to the wild, frantic cough that goes with the red face, the pounding of the table with the fist, and the swathing of the top of the head with the glowing bandanna handkerchief. This course would also prove a beautiful sanitary measure, inasmuch as the constant coughing would doubtless render the lawyer proof against colds, and preserve his throat, that he might ever be ready to accomplish the "forensic effort" in "stentorian tones." It would also make it easier for the young man starting out, and enable him to have an office with a fire and a desk in it, and not compel him to spend his life as a five-dollar chief clerk of a firm with a name longer than the moral law. No self-respecting legal luminary regards the cough as an unfair medium through which to attain his ends. If it were un fair, would the honest, upright judge, who could n't be purchased with Golcondas of shining gold, and whose only interest is in the cause of justice, cough during his charge?