The
Vol. IV.
No. 5.
Green
Bag.
BOSTON.
May, 1892.
THE ENGLISH BENCH AND BAR OF TO-DAY. V. SIR HENRY JAMES, Q. C, M. P. SIR HENRY JAMES, the great lawyer who refused the Lord Chancellorship for political conscience' sake, has had a strange and eventful history. His father, Mr. Philip Turner James, practised as a sur geon in Hereford, where the future AttorneyGeneral was born on Oct. 30, 1828. He was educated at Cheltenham College, upon the Council of which he is still a highly popular member. After leaving school, James came to London, and was apprenticed to Scott Russell, who, with the aid of the famous Brunei, engineered the " Great Eastern." But fortune had a greater if not a wealthier career in store for. the young apprentice than a partnership in a firm of ship-builders. In the suburb of Greenwich there was situ ated at that time one of those old-world clubs, half public-houses, half debating-so cieties, which figure so prominently in the literature and in the literary history of the eighteenth century. (Every one knows where Lord Thurlow got his first brief.) It was called the Belvidere; no one hears or knows anything of it now, but at the time of which we write it was a real and living force with in and beyond the immediate neighborhood. Every class of society, every profession and trade, every mode of thought and speech, of belief and disbelief, sent its representatives there. Many of those who frequented the Belvidere afterwards became famous men, and handsomely acknowledged its value as a training-school for future success. No better education for a Nisi Prius law25
yer could well be conceived than to take a prominent and habitual part in the debates of this old-fashioned rhetoric club, where the atmosphere was so free, if not from to bacco-smoke, at least from conventionality; where discussion was bounded only by the limits of human speculation; where argu ments were exchanged with a vigor worthy of Milton and Salmasius, and where minds of all fibres came into constant contact. Be tween the lawyers and the laymen in any so ciety, a line of demarcation seems inevitably to be drawn. Ill-disposed persons might perhaps say that when the wolf is on one side of the stream, the lamb instinctively selects the other. The Belvidere was no exception to the rule. It was divided into two regular factions or parties, — the one lay, the other legal. At the head of the lat ter were Parry and Joyce, who afterwards gained great names for themselves in West minster Hall. At the head of the former was Henry James. Popular, vivacious, and brilliant, he threw himself with ardor into the mock — yet from an educational point of view infinitely serious — debates which were held in this old-world inn. Soon he became conscious of his powers as an orator and debater, and forsook his quondam friends to join the ranks of his quondam rivals; he was admitted a student of the Middle Tem ple on Jan. 12, 1849, and was duly called to the bar on Jan. 16, 1852, sweeping the high est prizes which his society had to offer be fore him.
