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HENRY JOHN HODGSON, Esq., has been appointed Recorder of Ludlow, in the room of John Buckle, Esq., Recorder of Worcester, resigned.

It is our melancholy duty to record the demise of GEORGE SPENCE, Esq., Q. C., which took place under very distressing circumstances, by his own hand, on the 12th of December last. The details of the occurrence are still fresh in the memory of our readers, having been eagerly detailed by the daily press at the time, with that weak desire to gratify a morbid curiosity which is one of the worst errors in taste of the present day.

The deceased had attained his sixty-fourth year (having been born in 1787), and was in the full vigour of his faculties, as his great work, by which his name will be favorably handed down to posterity, fully testifies. Mr. Spence was a pupil in the chambers of the celebrated Mr. Bell, and was called to the Bar by the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple in 1811. He very early acquired an extensive and lucrative practice, and in 1827 entered parliament, succeeding, in the representation of Ripon, Sir Lancelot Shadwell (then Mr. Shadwell, the late lamented Vice-Chancellor); the vacancy being occasioned by the appointment of the latter to be Vice-Chancellor of England, in lieu of Sir Anthony Hart, appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland. This seat he retained until the parliament which was returned on the 29th of January, 1833, when both Mr. Spence, and his colleague, Mr. Pettit, lost their seats: he never sought another.

It is said that the House of Lords is the grave of the members of the House of Commons. It very often happens that barristers of large practice without the bar at once cease to command an active business on being called within it. This was eminently the case with Mr. Spence. While without the bar, he had the reputation of one of the largest, if not the largest business of all his compeers. But although he had a fair share of leading business in equity for some time after he had been raised to the dignity of a Queen's Counsel (in the Michaelmas Vacation, 1835), he did not as a leader retain the confidence of the solicitors in these courts. Thus deprived of the accustomed objects in the Senate and the Courts of Equity on which to exercise his activity and industry, he turned his attention to legal literature. He was chosen the first lecturer of Lincoln's Inn when an effort was made by the Inns of Court, a few years ago, to establish a regular course of Professional Studies and Examination among candidates for the Bar. The attempt, however, did not succeed, and the lectures were discontinued. At last, after years of patient and indefatigable labour, he gave to the world in 1846 the first volume of his "Chancery Jurisdiction," a work which immediately attracted the attention of jurists, not in England alone, but throughout Europe, displaying as it did a most intimate acquaintance with the antiquities of English and Roman legal literature, and of the influences their

1 For a detailed review of this first vol. see Law Mag., Vol. VIII. (N. S.) p.

distant streams produce on our modern jurisprudence: qualities which had indeed been indicated by an early work on the same subject, published in 1826, but which the labours and research of twenty years in the study and at the bar had matured and augmented. The second part of this great work, containing the modern practice of the Court of Chancery, was published in the close of the year 1849.1 Although mention was there made of an intended third volume, yet the work was, in a great measure, complete: and the revulsion of the nervous system, after it had been wound up to undergo, for a series of years, the labour of unceasing attention to minute details, and bringing references from a vast variety of authorities to bear upon one point, proved so oppressing to the spirits as to lead to the melancholy result we have already recorded. It will be remembered that a similar catastrophe, no doubt referable to the same causes, overtook the late Colonel Gurwood within about the same period after he had completed his great work, the "Wellington Despatches."

As a legislator, Mr. Spence distinguished himself by the attention which he bestowed to the subject of legal reform. In 1829-30 he resisted the then proposed appointment of a fourth judge in equity, from a conviction that such a measure would only augment the evils it was intended to remedy. But he was always a zealous reformer of the abuses in these courts: and in 1839 he published a pamphlet, in which he advocated the plan of Lord Langdale for a re-constitution of the Court of Chancery (ante, Art. III.) As a writer and speaker his style was plain, and unornamented by any figures of speech: sensible, clear and practical: and he had the art, or natural gift, of speaking upon abstruse and learned topics without using either abstruse or learned words.

1 This volume is reviewed, Law Mag., Vol. XXII. (N. S. p. 60.)

Correspondence.

MR. BARBER'S CASE.

[It is our practice to disregard all attacks, either on ourselves or the articles of our contributors, first, because we feel that we and they can well afford to do so, and, secondly, because the public have little or no interest in such controversies.

We therefore give insertion to the following exclusively because Mr. Barber's cause might possibly suffer by its non-insertion.— EDITOR.]

We find that with reference to our article in the last number of the Magazine, on the case of Mr. W. H. Barber, a writer in the Legal Observer-apparently somewhat of a freshman in the arts of advocacy-has accused us of gross misrepresentation of evidence, and of an unfounded attack on the judges of the Court of Queen's Bench. Many of our readers may perhaps recognize in this notice of the Legal Observer an awkward attempt to shift public attention from essentials to non-essentials; and to further prejudice Mr. Barber's case in the minds of the judges by the shuffling suggestion that their lordships have been rudely and unjustifiably assailed in our pages. As silence under such a charge would be fair evidence against us, we here emphatically deny it, not from deference to the Legal Observer, but from respect to their lordships. In a subsequent number of the Legal Observer, of date December 21st, 1850, the same writer, whilst endeavouring to justify his exclusion of a letter from Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Barber's attorney, charging the Legal Observer with garbling (a letter since published in pamphlet shape), returns to the charge against ourselves in these terms:- "The illtimed zeal which dictated the publication of the article in the pages of our quarterly contemporary, seemed to require that the attack it contained on the judges of the Court of Queen's Bench and the Incorporated Law Society (how we apples swim!') should be promptly answered." We do not think so. We cannot think our ill-timed zeal,—if ill-timed it were,-seemed to require that the Legal Observer volunteer should rush into the lists to break a lance with us in defence of the court. Our respect for their lordships of the Queen's Bench rests upon too deep and broad a foundation to allow us to think that they can ever stand in need of such advocacy.

But with the Legal Observer advocate of the Incorporated Law Society we must (notwithstanding we may expose ourselves to the charge of breaking a fly upon a wheel) be a little more particular. The circumstances upon which we are accused of misrepresenting evidence are these. The pardon of Mr. Barber issued on (amongst

other grounds) certain well authenticated confessions of Fletcher, Sanders, &c., most unequivocally exculpating Mr. Barber. These documents having been spoken of, and discussed before the master, their authenticity was admitted by Mr. Maugham of the Incorporated Law Society, and he was at the same time informed that they were lying at the Home Office. On the carrying in of the master's report, and on the hearing of Mr. Barber's late application to the court for the renewal of his annual certificate, Sir Frederick Thesiger, in showing cause on behalf of the Society, said, "that inquiry had been anxiously made as to what had become of the supposed confessions of Joshua Fletcher and William Sanders, made in the year 1844; what was done with them; how they were procured, and how they were used; and no satisfactory answer had been given." Mr. Barber and his attorney having months before this informed Mr. Maugham where the original confessions were lying, the former gentlemen were naturally much astonished on hearing Sir F. Thesiger's statement; and Mr. Stevenson promptly applied to Sir George Grey for an explanation. Sir George, by his secretary Mr. Waddington, replied "that no application had been made by the Incorporated Law Society with reference to these documents." As Sir Frederick had of course spoken only under instructions, this answer of Sir George Grey's placed the Law Society in a very unenviable position. Independently of the lie thus given by implication, it showed that the movers in this matter in the Society had gone out of their way, altogether gratuitously, and without the least foundation, to throw dirt upon and discredit Mr. Barber's case in the minds of the judges, by falsely suggesting that the confessions were only supposed ones, and that Mr. Barber could give no satisfactory answer as to "how they were procured," or "what had become of them," although "inquiry had been anxiously made."

We think, then, it must be pretty evident to any man of common sense, that the mere reading of copies of confessions, thus spoken of, must have been received by the court with natural suspicion and distrust.

To speak of them thus, then, could only be justified by the literal truth of the statement. But supposing that the statement be a mere fabrication, what can be said or written by any one that can too severely characterise such conduct? And whether it be a mere fabrication or not, the Legal Observer, although evidently speaking as one having authority, does not to this hour say that any inquiries were at any time made, anxiously or otherwise, at the Home Office or elsewhere.

Upon this conduct it was that we said, that the court being by these double dealing tactics shut out from a more special consideration of these most important confessions (the writer, in quoting the above expression, drops the words "more special") were left in the same predicament as the jury were in at the trial. To this statement we are obliged to adhere: for it is idle to speak of copies of confessions being read, which were read only to be repudiated and discredited

before the court. As well say that a forged bill of exchange produced in support of a prosecution was at the same time in evidence as a genuine instrument.

Upon further reflection, then, we think our strictures were too refined and gentle for the occasion. For the court were not only shut out from the evidence; but from the manner in which these confessions were spoken of, the judges were led to think worse of the applicant's case than if there had been no confessions at all. Certainly, had we been in Mr. Barber's position, we would rather have dispensed with such materials altogether than have consented to hear Sir F. Thesiger say of them" that every inquiry had been anxiously made as to what had become of these supposed confessions-how they were procured and how they were used; and no satisfactory answer had been given." If we have done the Society injustice in this view of the matter, it is somewhat unfortunate for that body, that another writer, Sir George Stephen, has followed in our wake, in a very able pamphlet lately published, in which with singular industry and acumen this and the other leading points of the case have been discussed with a result entirely opposed to that arrived at by the writer in the Legal Observer. In conclusion; we regret, for the credit of the profession, that the Legal Observer has not been more successful in the vindication of the Law Society's officers. There is a want of directness and an appearance of disingenuousness, not unmixed with impudence, in his mode of meeting our arguments, that remind us of attorneyism in the contemptuous and disparaging sense in which Carlyle loves to use that term. As a specimen of the impudence, we extract the following:-" As Mr. Stevenson disclaims any knowledge of the writer of the Law Magazine, it seems more convenient as well as more reasonable to allow this writer to defend himself from our strictures through the same channel he has chosen for the expression of his opinion on this matter."

As an exhibition of a convicted offender endeavouring to turn the tables on his judge, we have met with no parallel to this demonstration of the Legal Observer, since the story told by Lord Bacon. “A thief being in the dock, about to undergo sentence, cried to the officer of the court, Mr. Tipstaff, I give that old gentleman seated on the bench in the scarlet gown in custody to you, for I go in danger of my life of him.'

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TO CORRESPONDENTS.

PYTHAGORAS is thanked for his clever Paper.

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