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- about 1283
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- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 24 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under
any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought
the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of
progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the
“parsimony of the public,” which guilty public, it appeared, had been
until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means
enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed—I believe by
Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of
this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to
Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have
originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt
quotation from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets:
“My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!”
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what
has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here
that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of
Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence,
made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to
end.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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