never

This must have been eminently so in the case of Montagu Williams, whose name was familiar as household words, and who could not take a walk in the street without dozens of heads being turned to observe him. Yet this brilliant and eloquent advocate was not honoured with "silk" until he had ceased to practise at the bar, and had become one of those judicial dignitaries whose time-honoured distinction is to be called the worthy magistrate." He was unknown in the High Court of Justice, and he belonged to a bar where you may search for "silk" in vain, and at which the regular practitioner cannot hope to win the higher prizes of his profession. Unless fortune favours his escape from the smelly precincts of the Old Bailey, no matter how great his reputation may be there, he will find all other avenues blocked. In great cases he will be "led" by men distinguished in other spheres, and whose fee-books would make his own appear very insignificant. Probably "Monty earned more in his palmiest days than many a junior whose name is not known beyond the narrowest of narrow circles. It was in cases like that of Neill, the poisoner, that he achieved his reputation as easily the most able and eloquent criminal advocate. He says in his book, "Leaves of a Life," which most people have read, that he had defended more prisoners than any other living man; and he might have added, " restored more of them to their "friends and relations than any other living man." That was his specialty in the law, and it is doubtful whether, after he had fairly found his vocation, he cared for anything else in the sphere of law. He was not like Mr. Poland, Q.C.-whose name is hardly less known at the Old Bailey and to those interested in Old Bailey practice than was his-learned in various branches of quasi-criminal, quasi-civil matters, which have given him one of the most lucrative practices at the bar, and which require his presence in the High Court. Mr. Poland is one of the least eloquent of men; Montagu Williams was one of the most eloquent. Mr. Poland is a recluse of the law, and from society; Montagu Williams was a noted figure in all kinds of literary, theatrical, artistic, and sporting circles, and was fitted by nature, both in personal appearance and variety of attainments, to be an ornament, as his tastes led him to be, of such circles. He was too clever and versatile a man to succeed, or to care to succeed, in those branches of the law which require learning, and hard, dull, laborious work, with the minimum of human interest in it. He was attracted only by work which abounded in such interest; and his experience of life in its darker, unusual, and tragic side was what fascinated him with the profession which afforded him one of his chief means of obtaining it. Think of what the man must have seen and learned who defended Catherine Wilson, "the greatest "criminal who ever lived;" who was engaged in the mysteries of the Hatton Garden and the Cannon Street murders; who defended the perpetrators of the Clerkenwell explosion; who helped to unweave the complications of the turf frauds, the Penge mystery, the Lefroy case, the Lamson poisoning, and the Belt cases, and of others too numerous to mention. From his earliest days to his

latest the study of the less common forms of life, and the different forms of human experience, seems to have been his chief interest. It led him to a curiously varied career. After his Eton life, he was first schoolmaster, then soldier, then dramatic author-and by no means unsuccessful at that then actor, and then barrister; and it cannot be doubted that it was as the latter that he had hit upon the very sphere for his talents. Probably there must be a strong element of the dramatic. instinct in the successful advocate, and in appearance Montagu Williams might have been taken for the typical tragical actor. On the boards, however, he had been chiefly engaged in comedies; it was on the scenes of real life that he took his part in tragedies. When cancer of the throat put an end to his career at the bar, and the operation by which a cure was sought to be effected left him practically voiceless for purposes of advocacy, he made his occupancy of the magisterial bench at Greenwich and Woolwich and Worship Street remarkable for the manner in which he performed its duties, and his name indeed became a terror to those who did evil, and the praise of those who did well,-especially when the evil were the owners of slum property, and those who did well were the poor, whose powerful friend, sympathiser, and champion he showed himself to be against their tyrants and victimisers. Sanitary reformers and all who are trying to secure justice and mercy as the portions of the poor, whose poverty and ignorance are their destruction, could rely on him always as a sagacious and fearless coadjutor in their projects. By personal visiting at the wretched homes of that extensive and misery-stricken class, who were the usual attendants at his court, he made himself acquainted with their wants, and by his relief of their distresses, and by his aid in many ways, they came to look upon him as Montagu Williams, the poor man's friend. One could hardly have expected that the most famous criminal lawyer of his time would be one of the most really beloved of men, and that his death at this Christmas time would have brought sorrow to many a poor and honest home in London.

Appointments, Business Changes, &c.

GLASGOW JURIDICAL SOCIETY.-The public address of the session to the members of this society was delivered in the Queen's Rooms on 21st December, by Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., LL.D., Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford. There was a large attendance of members of the society and others. The subject of the address was "Archaism in Modern Law." The annual dinner of the society took place in the St. Enoch Hotel on the following evening. There was an attendance of between sixty and seventy, and the chair was occupied by Sheriff Berry, the honorary president.

HAZELL'S ANNUAL FOR 1893.-We have received a copy of this admirable publication, which will be found of much use in lawyers' as in all other kinds of offices. We heartily commend it as a mine of useful information.

SHERIFF GUTHRIE was previously known as a learned jurist and experienced judge, and his recent opportune "pastoral”* marks him as a leader in the ranks of legal reformers. A sense of the unfitness of things has been growing very rapidly in recent years, and it is a hopeful sign when it reaches the class who, by their very duties, are rendered the preservers and not the reformers of existing institutions. Moreover, the need of reform must be great which forces into speech a somewhat reticent member of the bench, where silence on all controversial topics is imposed by custom and is broken only on occasions of great clamancy. Whether the Sheriff's remedy is good or bad, whether his suggestion is adopted or rejected, the public are indebted to Mr. Guthrie for the information he has supplied, and for the new and original proposal with which he concludes his pregnant address.

Surely no one will deny that Sheriff Guthrie has made out a case for exceptional treatment in favour of Glasgow. So far as his observations went, he would leave other parts of Scotland to continue the double sheriffship as long as they can stand it. In these days of home rule this may be fair enough, but it is a pity for the country at large to pay for a system which, though tolerated by many without complaint, is defended with heartiness by none. The Sheriff's address also recognises the now scarcely doubted fact that the double sheriffship is the first point on which the judicial reformer must make up his mind. It is the keystone of the fabric of judicial reform. The one-man appeal is reasonable only on the supposition that he is a lawyer, and that the other man is not. Time was when the appointments gave some

* See p. 47 of this month's REVIEW,

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ground for what the Sheriffs-Substitute would now justly resent as a libel. Fancy the judgments of a Lord Ordinary being appealed to the Lord President sitting solus! Who would accept a reversal, or fear to go further in the face of an adherence? And yet we waste our time with this sort of judiciary in the provinces. But then the provinces-Dornoch and Glasgow, for instance-are not Edinburgh, and whatever goes wrong in the provinces can be put right (for a consideration) in the metropolis. The Sheriff reminds us that Glasgow is great. Is even Greater Glasgow entitled to anything different from Wick or Wigtown? Not if Scotland exists for the support of the judicial establishment in Edinburgh. It took the beheading of Charles to teach the Stuarts (if it did teach them) that the king was for the country, not the country for the king; and only the horrors of the French Revolution taught the French nobles that they had mistaken the froth for the cream of France and the French nation. What will persuade a Lord Advocate that the people who pay his salary should be considered before the brethren who crowd so near him that they hide from his view his true clients, the public of Scotland? Is he not Her Majesty's Advocate for the public interest? Perhaps proper clauses in the Bill for erecting Glasgow into a county would force his hand to grant the judicial establishment needed by that vast community, or give good reasons for refusing anything exceptional. Even the latter would be something. In such a case Glasgow would have seven voices in the House of Commons, and these would surely not go for nothing. There is a limit to the self-defence of vested interests, and that limit would soon be reached in a public discussion in the House of Commons. Scotland has a Home Rule Secretary who happens to represent one of the divisions of Glasgow. He could, of course, be trusted to put the case for Glasgow clearly before Parliament, and the Town Council could see that the case was put clearly before him. All this might lighten the labours of the Lord Advocate, and cause him to consider the case for Glasgow on its own merits without allowing the interests of Edinburgh to obscure his vision. No doubt the Edinburgh press would shriek and scold and be hysterically abusive, but his lordship knows that nobody would be a penny the worse. The present, therefore, seems a favourable time for seeking a remedy for Glasgow instead of waiting for a measure of general application to Scotland, and doubtful suitability to the circumstances of Glasgow.

The novelty in Sheriff Guthrie's suggestion is to use the Lords Ordinary in Glasgow both for Courts of first instance and as a Court of Appeal. But why touch the jurisdiction of the Sheriff

Court on the occasion of providing a suitable appeal from its judgments? Rather, we would say, leave all questions as to jurisdiction to be settled when a comprehensive measure of reform of the Scottish judicatories is under discussion. There appears to be nothing to hinder the abolition of the Sheriff Principalship and the distribution of his administrative work amongst the Sheriffs as convenience might suggest (all the Sheriffs being equal in official status and ranked only by seniority, like Lords Ordinary), and the appointment of three Lords Ordinary for Glasgow to form the Court of Appeal from the judgments of the Sheriffs. It could be enacted that an appellant should have power to appeal as at present to the Inner House, and, of course, the respondent would have to acquiesce, as he must at present, in the appellant's choice of the Division of the Inner House. But there could not be an appeal to the three Lords Ordinary in Glasgow, and then an appeal to the Inner House. The Glasgow appeal, when selected, would have to be the exact equivalent of the present appeal to Edinburgh and exhaustive of it. It would be interesting to watch the result of such an arrangement in order to find whether litigants go to Edinburgh because they have no choice, or for the Edinburgh reason that there is no law or legal knowledge worth mentioning out of the Parliament House.

The three Lords Ordinary, sitting two or three days a week, would easily get through the appeals from the Sheriffs of Glasgow and from the Sheriff Courts of such counties as might be included by request (of, say, their County Councils) in the Act establishing the new Court. The balance of time at the disposal of the appeal judges might be used by each judge sitting as a Lord Ordinary in his own Court of first instance, with a privative jurisdiction precisely the same as that of the Lords Ordinary in Edinburgh, but restricted to the counties over which their jurisdiction extends in appeals. To this proposal there can be no objection except such as may be inspired by the exclusiveness of Edinburgh vested interests and sentiments, and these are not worthy of a moment's consideration against the convenience, and therefore the rights, of the public in the west of Scotland.

The new Lords Ordinary would have to be resident in Glasgow. A travelling Court or set of judges would be intolerable and as unsatisfactory as every law agent has found the Appeal Court of an Edinburgh Sheriff sitting in one country town and due in another town of his county. The legitimate drama is not seen at its best in a travelling theatre, even when a star actor occupies the boards. If the appointment of the three Lords Ordinary in Glasgow made five too many for Edinburgh, the