(as already stated, and for the reasons already stated) not to array conflicting probabilities and decide between them, but to urge as forcibly as he can the arguments on one side of the question. But in doing this it is not his duty to resort to sophistry or false logic. We are all of us, of course, every day, continually using, consciously or unconsciously, sophistical arguments on one subject or another; and all that can reasonably be required of the advocate is that he shall not knowingly do so; but so much may reasonably be required. And it is in vain to urge in excuse that the advocate is but the mouthpiece of his client, and therefore irresponsible for the language or the arguments which he advances. "He is a representative, but not a delegate. He gives to his client the benefit of his learning, his talents, and his judgment; but all through he never forgets (or should never forget) what he owes to himself and to others. If he be the advocate of an individual, and retained and remvnerated (often inadequately) for his valuable services, yet he has a prior and perpetual retainer on behalf of truth and justice; and there is no crown or other licence which in any cause, or for any party, can discharge him from that primary and paramount retainer.” * And whenever he asserts aught of his own opinion or belief, he is of course bound to assert only that which he conscientiously believes. To engage an advocate is not to suborn a false witness. But probably, as a general rule, the less an advocate gives of his own opinions or beliefs, the better. Some men are from temperament more inclined than others to sympathize with and believe that truth and justice are on the side of the cause committed to them; so that to introduce the opinions of the respective litigants' counsel must tend to make the success or failure of either party's cause in some measure dependent upon an uncertain and accidental condition. Actual lying, wilful misrepresentations, we may pass by without comment.

There is one thing in argument (or more properly in persuasion) which an advocate is surely bound in honour to avoid, but which, nevertheless, men of the fairest reputation in their profession sometimes allow themselves to be guilty of—that is, influencing the jury by considerations utterly foreign to the case. For instance, if the credit of a witness be impeached on the ground of his having been previously convicted of some heinous crime, surely it is hardly honourable to try and get the jury to believe him out of compassion! Yet men of good standing will attempt this. If the question were indeed one of generosity or harshness towards a fallen man, then, no doubt, it would be right and praiseworthy to talk feelingly of the duty of charity, but when the fate of the witness is in no way dependent on the issue, but the question is one for impartial decision between the parties, such eloquence is then the purest clap-trap. And it is no excuse for such devices to say that it is open to the other side to set the balance right by resorting to the like trickery (for no

* Justice Crampton, in "The Queen v. O'Connell.”—7 Irish Law Reports, pp. 312-13.

other word can be used), or to undo the ill effect produced by showing how unfair are such appeals to the passions; for if the effect is to be undone, why produce it? And if the other side are to resort to the like devices, what security can there remain for a true and just decision? The one simple test for all ordinary questions of right and wrong in advocacy is this: "Will the cause of truth be advantaged, supposing both parties resort to the like means?"

So long (it is well to observe) as an advocate conforms to this test by obeying faithfully the above and similar rules of argument to which it gives rise, it is not only most absurd, but it is most unwise on the part of a disinterested public to blame him for advancing, to the best of his ability, the arguments on one side only of the question. I do not say unfair so to blame him: for barristers are men of the world, and we know that, "when men are men of the world, hard words" (if undeserved) "run off them like water off a duck's back :" but I do say "most unwise," since every word of disparagement of that which does not merit it, takes from the weight of condemnation lying on that which really deserves reprehension. Let the public, then, reserve such epithets as "venal eloquence" for an employment of talents to which they justly apply.

A difficulty will, no doubt, be started here. "Granting," it will be said, "that he is in every sense a faultless advocate, who, his like pleading on the other side, pleads in such a way that the right side (humanly speaking) cannot fail to triumph; granting, further, that if two advocates were opposed to each other, each pursuing with equal ability the course above indicated, the truth would triumph with greater certainty in this way than by any other; yet an advocate is not justified in pleading in this partial manner when his opponent is inferior to him in ability." Not a very practical difficulty this. For, in the first place, the smaller matters get the smaller men, the greater matters the men of largest experience and ability. And a difference in ability may seem to exist where there is really none: want of brilliancy is often compensated by the possession of faculties less conspicuous but more effective. Scarlett was at least as great an advocate as Brougham. And if there should be, on the whole, a real difference in the ability with which the respective causes are conducted-if the one is done justice to and the other not-the client has probably his own carelessness to blame for not choosing a more proper representative. It rarely happens that a client is so poor as to be unable to secure in the usual way the services of an able advocate; and when the case does occur, the bar of England is not so devoid of men of spirit and honour that he need fear to want assistance, if his cause be just. But though, for these and other reasons, an advocate can rarely be required by any principle to relax his efforts, or to do part of the work which properly falls on the other side, yet it can never be lawful for him to take advantage of the inexperience of an opponent by resorting to means of forwarding his cause which he would never think of resorting to if opposed

by an equal in ability. Great advocates have done this, but surely it is eminently un-English and unfair.

It must, however, be confessed that although these one-sided contentions are sound in principle, and work well in practice where the end in view is to arrive at impartial truth, yet they are scarcely fitted, without modification (and even though each advocate conformed strictly to the theory of his office), for inquiries where to arrive at absolute truth is of less importance than not to err in a certain direction: and this is the reason why in criminal cases—where, obviously, it is of greater moment not to convict the prisoner if innocent than to ensure his conviction if guilty-the counsel for the crown is required not only to abstain from all false argument and from other like courses from which no good can ever come, and which the counsel in civil cases also are bound to avoid, but to abate somewhat of his exertions in urging sound arguments, and to point out to a considerable extent the arguments on the other side. The prisoner's counsel, on the other hand, is allowed, in the same spirit of moderation towards the accused, rather a wider licence than is conceded to counsel in civil cases: subject to some qualifications, he is expected to take, on behalf of his client, every advantage which the facts or the law afford. But though, speaking broadly, the counsel for an accused person is considered justified in taking, on behalf of his client, every advantage which the facts or the law afford, he is not held justified by the opinion of the bar, any more than by that of the public, in directing suspicion upon an innocent person when he knows of his client's guilt as appeared with sufficient clearness in a notable case that occurred some years ago.

The whole subject of the moral code of the Bar is a most interesting one. Yet more important is the spirit by which its members are animated. True and weighty are those old words of Hooker:* "If they which employ their labour and travail about the public administration of justice follow it only as a trade, with unquenchable and unconscionable thirst for gain, being not in heart persuaded that justice is God's own work, and themselves his agents in the business, the sentence of right, God's own verdict, and themselves his priests to deliver it, formalities of justice do but smother right, and that which was necessarily ordained for the common good is, through shameful abuse, made the cause of common misery."

* Eccl. Pol. bk. v.

Erasmus.

ONE of the most singular literary revolutions is that which has befallen the great modern writers who, in acquiring their fame, used as an instrument the Latin language. We are not thinking now of men who, like Bacon, Spinoza, and scores of others, have employed Latin as a natural medium for communicating with the learned on philosophical subjects; nor of those who, like Gray or Addison, have occasionally produced pieces in professed imitation of the classical writers. We are thinking of that earlier race, to whom, whatever the language of their mothers or nurses, Latin was practically the language of their lives; who wrote in it whatever they wrote, histories, commentaries, epigrams, or private letters; who formed from it, and the Greek, the very names by which they were known throughout Europe; and who lived and corresponded familiarly with Danes, Poles, Portuguese, Italians, English, on the common basis of the use of a classical tongue, and the study of the classical literature. That these men performed an immense service to our modern civilization no competent judge will deny. But while enjoying the honey, the world has forgotten the bees. Age by age, as the modern languages have developed themselves, and the modern literatures have absorbed the riches of the past, oblivion has slowly gathered over the founders and pioneers of the new era. Like the knight mentioned by Froissart, who fell overboard from a galley, and was instantly sunk by his armour, their classical panoply has dragged them down. So it has been with Politian, with Mariana, with Buchanan, with Muretus; and so with ERASMUS, who had a prouder name and a greater popularity than them all. What we propose to do on this occasion, is simply to tell the general reader, to whom Erasmus is a name only, what manner of man he was and what kind of life he led; what was his influence on the modern world, and what his claims on the gratitude of mankind.

By race Erasmus was one of the great Teutonic stock, and always held it the chief success of his life that he had raised the condition of literature on the northern side of the Alps, and enabled "Germans" to dispute with Italians that supremacy in scholarship which more recent ages have conceded to them in music. But if he was "a German," as he sometimes calls himself, in this sense, he was more strictly a Dutchman or Netherlander, and was born a subject of the Dukes of Burgundy, to whom Holland had passed by an heiress in an earlier part of the fifteenth century. The circumstances of his birth were romantic; and the life of his father, Gerard, has been made in our own age the subject of a romance. Gerard belonged to a respectable middle-class family at Gouda, about twelve

miles from Rotterdam, on the way to Utrecht,-a decayed old town with a great grass-grown square, still visited by the tourist for the sake of some painted glass in its principal church. He was a man of good education as the times went, and had much of the wit and liveliness which afterwards distinguished his son-too much of it for a certain Margaret, daughter of a physician at Sevenbergen in Brabant, who became a mother by him without waiting till she had become his wife. But the case was not an ordinary one. She was of his own class. He had solemnly affianced himself to her, and he would have married her but for a base stratagem of which they were the victims. His relations, unwilling that he should fulfil his promises, wrote to him at Rome, where he was pushing his fortune, that Margaret was dead. In a fit of despair, and perhaps of remorse, he took religious vows, and raised up an impassable barrier between them. On his return to Holland and discovery of the cheat, he and Margaret, without living as husband and wife, still did their duty by their offspring. They lived till Gerard Gerardi, or Desiderius Erasmus (as he called himself by a kind of classical pun on his Dutch names), was about fourteen years old, and left him some means, which his guardians administered with base dishonesty. Few great men have had such a constant struggle with adverse fortune-beginning, one may say, at the cradle-as this great Restorer of Letters, Conservative Reformer, and First Scholar of a memorable age.

He was born at Rotterdam, either in 1465 or 1467-we ourselves incline to accept the former date,-and the prosperous sea-port still cherishes in its market-place the brazen seventeenth-century statue of him, which looks so quaint in its cap and gown among fruit-stalls and cabbage-stalls and barges gliding along green canals. A delicate and quiet boy with yellow hair and blue eyes, he must have been a pretty sight on his way to school at Gouda—as a chorister in the cathedral of Utrecht -as a youthful student at Deventer. He loved his studies early, barbarous as were the books then in use; and his weak health tended to keep him attached to them, and withdrawn from the noise and convivialities of a jolly, but rough and uncultivated people. Nature had made him a man of letters; circumstances compelled him to become, sorely against his will-first a monk, and then a priest. The author of Tristram Shandy was not more unlike Mr. Stiggins, the author of Peter Plymley's Letters was not more unlike Mr. Chadband, than Erasmus was unlike the average friar, monk, or priest of that day. His constitution was peculiarly unfitted for the monastic life, either in its grave or gay aspects, to begin with. He required to eat frequently in small quantities, and could not bear an alternation of fasting with feasting. He had a particular disrelish for fish. He only slept well in the early part of the night, and if he was once disturbed could not compose himself again for hours. His natural piety was strong, or certainly not deficient, but ceremonies bored and wearied him; while the heavy feeds and "prolix compotations," as he calls them, with which the inhabitants of monasteries