The Sun.
London, England, 1848-06-10 00:00:00

N
ON THE MORAL, SOCIAL, AND PROit'S..l.,.;
SIONAL DUTIES OP ATTORNEYS.

BY SAMUEL WARREN.''
•
Last evening the fouth of a series-of -Lectures,san
the Moral, Social, a d Professional' Duties of
ee
torneys and Solicitors, was delivered esisillq
the Law Society, in Chancery-lane, by—we give the
name with a respectful simplicity—Samuel Warren.
That fourth lecture brought the series to a conclu-
sion ; and we, who had the gratification of hearing it
articulated by the lips of Mr. Warren, may be per-
mitted to regret that the series was not one of a more
protracted character. It was something, we thought,
to listen to the author of " Ten Thousand a-Year,"
of the " Diary of a Physician," and last, and by no
means least memorable for its austere beauty, of the
dramatic narrative of "Now and Then," in the ca•
pacity of a lecturer. And a lecturer, too, upon a
theme intimately connected with ',the profession to
which the whole of the intellectual energies of Mr.
Warren appear to have been directed. We say "the
whole of his energies," because whatever reputation-
Mr. Warren has acquired in literature he has ac-
quired by the immediate combination of his legal
knowledge with his ingenuity as a novelist, excepting,
of course, his first work, the "Diary of a Late Phy-
sician "—a work which, according to the revelations
prefixed to a recent edition, was completed in his ex-
treme youth, before indeed his professional career
could have been seriously commenced. In all his
subsequent compositions in general literature--in all
those, at least, which have come under our conside-
ration as critics—the fact has seemed to us to be very
conspicuous, that the ambition of the writer has been
always, essentially and strictly, a forensic ambition.
Look, for example, at the elaborate and even pro-
found acquaintance with the law displayed in the
fiction which recounts the vicissitudes of Charles
Aubrey and of Tittlebat Titmouse in refe-
rence to the acquisition of Yatton. Look
again at " Now and Then " a tale which
is at once a reverent commentary on the Book of Job,
and the rode mecum to a portion of the most interest-
ing lore of "the courts"—touching at one moment
upon the laws relating to the preservation of game,
at another upon the penalties inflicted for the
crime_of homicide, and incidentally in short upon
several of the most remarkable segments in the great
circle of criminal jurisprudence. Or look at some of
the brief and less pretentious papers contributed by
the same writer to Blackwood's Magazine. In every
instance the tendency is legal, the tone is legal, the
very inspiration is legal. His terse and masterly
analysis of the character of Sir *William Follett to
wit, or his intricate and bewildering argument, en-
titled, " Who is the murderer ?" Obvious as these
facts are, they nevertheless require some direct enume-
ration, since the vulgar prejudice is to the effect that
a man who writes a story book cannot by
possibility be a sound lawyer. And we are
induced to insist upon the circumstance of Mr. War-
ren's devotion to the law, apart from his individual
labours as a barrister, or his elementary books as a
student in jurisprudence, because were we not con-
vinced that his whole mind was inflamed with that
paramount devotion, we should not dedicate ten mi-
nutes' attention, or one inch of our columns to the
commemoration of the lectures which have just ter-
minated. Mr. Warren last evening called the law a
jealous mistress, and it is precisely because we believe
him to have viewed her throughout his career in the
light of a jealous mistress that we are induced to no-
tice his recent enunciations as a lecturer. And, again,
it is precisely because many persons cannot
comprehend how a lawyer can attain eminence
in the belles lettreslawyer can attain eminence
in the belaB letlreB Withou t deteriorating his
professional reputation that we have prefaced
our allusions to the lecture of yesterday by main-
taining that the ability of a novelist and the skill of
on
nliayv ycehra
naroee
oort iwn pwa
rt iobtlee pa Es
grusikniancel e
swas not the
verses; neither was Sir Thomas More the
oundly oneov love
who wrote with his whole soul about a mere vision,
though no one has ever since written, or ever will
write, a second Utopia. Mr. Warren, therefore, has
proved himself, to our thinking, to he eminently
qualified to instruct others in the difficult and abstruse
science to which his attention has been so sedulously
directed ; he has proved this not only by the labours
of an honourable career, but also in a particular
manner by those very works of imagination which,
to the superficial observer, constitute only a negation
of his professional pretensions. It was, consequently,
on this account that we listened, last evening, to his
discourse upon the responsibilities devolving upon
attorneys and solicitors, with feelings beyond those
of mere curiosity. And it is for this reason that we
regard the series of lectures of which that discourse
formed the conclusion, as entitled in a very express
and particular manner to a notice of comment and
commemoration. Without giving a minute report
of the lecture delivered yesterday in the hall of the
Law Society, by Mr. Warren, it would be frivolous
to attempt to convey any adequate idea of its charac-
ter. Our intention is, therefore, restricted within a
much narrower compass; we are only solicitous to
convey to the minds of those who were not among
the auditors some fragmentary notion of the discourse
through the medium of a very fragmentary reminis-
cence. In one of the introductory paragraphs of his
final lecture, Mr. Warren eloquently vindicated the
profession of the law from that imputation of barrenness
which we have already alluded to, and which asserts in
the most dogmatic manner imaginable that literary
celebrity and the celebrity of the jurisconsult cannot
be acquired simultaneously. Nobly and passionately
did he fling back this preposterous assertion in the
teeth of the accusers, apostrophizing them as
" plodding dullards," and reminding them that the il-
lustrious Hallam was a barrister as well as an historian,
that Bishop Warburton toiled at the desk of a soli-
citor's office before his mind was first entranced by
the seductive charms of theology, and that Sharon
Turner—the erudite and luminous annalist of Eng-
land—was, up to the hour of his decease, a practising
attorney ! In another portion of his dicourse the lec-
turer insisted upon the necessity of a lawyer striving
perpetually for the acquisition of general or, so to
speak, miscellaneous knowledge remembering
always the renowned aphorism of Lord Bacon, that
" knowledge is power,' and instancing the utility of
obtaining information beyond the ordinary require-
ments of the law by supposing that a philosopher, a
Michael Faraday for example, offers himself as a
client to some solicitor who is unable to understand a
word he says from his profound ignorance upon scien-
tific matters. In illustration of the supreme respon-
sibilities which may at any moment devolve upon an
attorney, the lecturer recounted the following very
beautiful incident :—" A short time ago," said Mr.
Warren, " a gentleman of large fortune, a man in
fact worth his 40,0001., was indignant with his only
child, a daughter, for marrying against his wishes.
He quarrelled with her—he disinherited her—he left
his whole property of 40,0001. to his attorney, and to
two other gentlemen, all of whom were residing in
Yorkshire. What did the attorney do? He went
to his two co•legatees, got them to resign their respec-
tive claims over to himself, and then made over every
sixpence of the 40,0001. to the daughter and her chil-
dren ! When I mentioned this circumstance this very
morning to a friend of mine, one of the most
distinguished men at the bar, he exclaimed,
and I doubt not you will coincide in the exclamation,
God bless that man !' " . . . Very different was
the effect of another anecdote 'given by Mr. Warren
in the course of his lecture, when speaking of the
necessity for vigilance on ie part of an attorney.
"I myself," said he, "have recognised the brother of
the defendant acting as a juryman upon a case, and I
have been assured, on credible authority, that on
one occasion the plaintiff was actually seen sneaking
into the jury-box!" The sly humour with which this
was uttered, elicited an explosion of laughter. It
reminded one of the satirist of the Tagrags and the
Gammons. . . The principal merit of the lec-
ture, however, consisted in the communication of
wholesome advice to the young practitioners, respect-
ing their moral, social, and professional duties. Upon
these points Mr. Warren was admirably axiomatic.
Among other things he maintained, that " the office
of the law was—not to cause litigation—but to pre-
vent litigation." And he particularly impressed upon
his hearers the advisability of a law-student keeping
pace with the age in which he lived, so that he might
to the full appreciate " the difference between reform
and revolution, between reparation and disorganiza-
tion." Altogether, the lectures of Samuel Warren
have proved to be the choicest fruits of his exact and
laborious researches in the science of jurisprudence.

NEW HISTORICAL WORKS.—We are requested to
state that Mr. Colburn has this day published, " the
Court and Times of Charles I. ; including Memoirs of
the Mission in England of the Capuchin Friars in the
service of Queen Henrietta Maria, by Father Cyprien de
Gamache," edited by the author of " Memoirs of Sophia
Dorothea, consort of George I. The Court and
Times of James 1.," &c., in 2 vols. Bvo., 2Ss. bound.—
Also, just published, "the Court and Times of James 1.,
illustrated by authentic and confidential letters from
public and private manuscript collections," 2 vole. Bvo.,
2ss. bound.

THE CHARTIST MEETING ON MONDAT.—The
Government are determined to use every means in their
power to put a stop to these times of excitement, and
have given orders for all the troops to assemble again
in London by Sunday night, and we hope that this will
be the last time the military will have to attend without
being called upon to act in a manner which will be the
means of putting a death-blow to this lawless set.
At the Middlesex Sessions yesterday Thomas
Smith, alias " Tiger" Smith, a captain in the 15th Ben-
gal Native Infantry, was brought up for judgment, he
having been convicted of defrauding Mr. Bishop, the
gunsmith, and Mr. Almond, army accoutrement maker,
of Bond-street, of a 101. note and five sovereigns in
cash, for cheques on the Oriental Bank, in which the pri-
soner had no account. The Learned Sergeant sentenced
him to hard labour for four calendar months.