SKETCHES FROM THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE. III. BARON MONCRIEFF. By A. Wood Renton. THE ex-Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland can as ill be spared from a group of modern Scottish judicial silhouettes as his successful rival, the late Lord President. James, Baron Moncrieff, is the second son of Sir James Wellwood Moncrieff, some time a judge of the Court of Session, but best remembered by his courageous though fruit less defence of the murderer Burke, in 1828. His grandfather, Sir Harry Moncrieff, is fa miliar to all students of Henry Cockburn's "Memorials of his own Time," as the leader of the " Wild " or Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland in the beginning of the present century. Moncrieff was born in 1811, and, like every eminent Scotsman of his day, was educated first at the High School, and then at the University of Edin burgh. He was admitted to the Scotch Bar in 1833, two years before the late Lord President Inglis. The stars in their courses fought for him. Gifted by nature with an inheritance of influence, pecuniary comfort, character, and ability, and carefully educated, Moncrieff rose rapidly into practice. In 1850 he was made Solicitor-General for Scotland by the Liberal party. In the following year he was raised to the Lord Advocateship, — an office which he held almost without in terruption till his elevation to the bench in 1869. During his tenure of the chief law officership, namely, in 1857, it fell to Moncrieff's lot to prosecute Miss Madeline Smith for the alleged murder of her lover, L'Angelier. The facts of this case have already been stated, and in some measure discussed in our sketch of Inglis. But Moncrieff's part in it was so important, and throws so much light on Scotch criminal procedure, that, at the risk of repetition, we shall refer
to it again. Criminal procedure in England is mainly litigious in character. The judge is not so much a judicial or executive officer, with independent powers of investigation, as a State arbiter, bound to hear and decide between the cases made respectively by the prosecutor and the accused. In spite of our attorney and solicitor-generalships, and our directorships of public prosecutions, this is still the prominent feature of the adjective criminal law of England. A criminal trial is essentially a litigation. The prosecutor "opens," and has the right of reply; and unless he is a peculiarly fair-minded man, he presses the criminal charge home to the prisoner as keenly as if the latter were merely a defendant, and the question at is sue a paltry dispute about the warrant of a horse, or the price of a suit of clothes. No more honorable advocate than Sir Alexander Cockburn ever practised at the bar of any country in the world; yet he summed up the case for the Crown against Palmer with as much vehemence as if he had been plead ing for damages in an action for breach of promise of marriage. The conduct of Mr. Adolphus (of Adolplins & Ellis notoriety), who prosecuted Courvoisier for the murder of Lord William Russell, was a still more discreditable instance of the same juridical tendency. This gentleman endeavored to impress upon the jury that Courvoisier, be ing a foreigner, would naturally kill in order that he might rob with impunity; "opened" alleged facts which were triumphantly dis proved; strained every circumstance in the prisoner's behavior into an indication or tacit admission of guilt, and so demeaned himself that but for the discovery of the deceased nobleman's missing plate, Courvoisier would
