The Warwickshire Herald. — 1889-12-19 (Birmingham, West Midlands, England)

ALFRED BALER.  Mr. Baker is the " Oregano " of the Aston Bench. He speaks an infinite deal of nothing, at least so some people are vulgar enough to think. But truly Mr. Baker is loquacious, and at times certainly a little tedious. " Brevity,' ' says Shakespeare, "is the soul of wit, and. tediousness but the outward flourishes ;" and if that be accepted, how soul-less most be Mr. Baker's wit! At times his loquacity descends into garrulity, and when listening to his platitudinous sentences, one often asks oneself whether it is possible he ever read As You Like It, and pondered the advice which was given to "Bertram," "Be taxed for silence, but never checked for speech." Mr. Baker's magisterial observations are spun out to an inordinate and wearysosne length. Even in ordering a man to pay half a crown for being drunk, it is nothing unusual for Mr. Baker to address the delinquent for upwards of five or ten minutes, pointing out to him in tautological and grand iloquent phrases, the enormity of his offence, reminding him of the indelible stain he has cast upon the escutcheon of his family and warning him that unless he turns from the paths of inebriety, ho will undoubtedly proceed headlong to perdition. Mr. Baker' style of delivery is heavy and fatherly, and however admirably it may be calculated to impress the casual visitor with the dignity and oratorical resources of the Bench, its influence is ever that of a soporific. The gravity, and length of his utterances are generally found to be in the ratio of the seriousness of the case on which he is adjudicating. Five minutes is about the time which, on an average, Mr. Baker spends in addressing a man charged with being drunk, and the time he would oratorically occupy in the case ' of a murder would be in the same ratio to the five minutes as the capital offence is to the inebriety ; but what that relation is ,we have never been able to exactly ascertain, and as we believe Mr. Baker has never been called upon to adjudicate upon a murder case we have never been able to satisfactorily estimate over how many days his address to a man accused of the most serious of offences would extend.. Approximately, however, we believe it would last about five days and a half. We should think that Mr. Baker and posterity has a score against the reporters who attend the Aston Police Court. His speeches are never reported though we have •bserved on more than one occasion Mr Baker when speaking in an usually impressive manner bestow upon the newspaper representatives a why-don't-yeu-report-me kind of a look. This persistent neglect by the reporters not altogether understandable; on one occasion we spoke to our representative on the matter, and asked him why he did not report Mr. Baker verbatim. The reporter muttered a word very much like "twaddle," and vouchsafing no other explanation went on with his ,vriting. Notwithstanding this excuse for it was no reason for not fully reporting Mr. Baker we have every reason to believe that the reporter has a verbatim note of every word Mr. Baker ever uttered in his capacity as a magistrate, and that he intends rendering himself independent of editors and enjoying an immunity from County Court summonses and writs by publishing, in book form, the Bakerian utterances. If the title of the volume has not yet been decided upon, we would suggest that it be " Vox ET