Stories of the Four Courts

From the Irish Quarterly Review, republished in the Dublin Evening Mail of 6 April 1853, a stinging reproof of the young Irish Bar as a bunch of degenerate, effeminate dandies and fops prioritising fashion, gossip and the Polka above learning and advocacy.

If this decline in standards did in fact occur c.1850, it may have been due to the noted fall in litigation due to the Famine, making judicial and quasi-judicial positions even more prized than previously. The most accessible of these, available to counsel with more than six years’ practice, was that of assistant-barrister, which involved presiding over Civil Bill Courts. Contacts and being known socially helped in attaining this coveted prize.

The author of the article is not known, but the editor of the Irish Quarterly Review was Patrick Joseph (P.J.) Murray, a Catholic member of the Leinster Bar, who presumably endorsed its contents.

“THE MODERN IRISH BAR

(FROM THE IRISH QUARTERLY REVIEW FOR APRIL)

If we listen in the hall or in the library of the Four Courts, in place of the dashing, racy, conversation of former days, we hear nothing but the bald talk of budding betting men, who can tell you all the odds at Tattersall’s or at Dycer’s, and who can canvass the last letter of ‘Littleleg’s’ and speculate upon the next run with the ‘Ward’.  We see Judges’ sons and nephews looking with contempt upon their brother barristers and introducing the cliqueism of their mothers’ drawing rooms into that place, where every man who bears himself as a gentleman, and wears a gown, is fully their equal.  We perceive legal exquisites, who come down to court at one o’clock, in patent leather boots and Haubikant’s gloves, and two are known only as the patrons of the Almack’s subscription balls at the Rotunda, or as the habitues of Merrion-square, and as flâneurs at the bands on Kingstown jetty, where they prove their believe in Paul de Kock’s maxim ‘C’est si gentile d’avoir une belle cousine!”

No thought of professional learning, or of Ireland, ever crosses their minds; they can tell you all the petty scandal of the city, and appear as if meant by nature for men-milliners rather than for barristers, and all their empty chatter is of the absurd, would-be, exclusive coteries of Dublin.  They known nothing of pleas or of declarations, but are deeply versed in all the mysteries of the Polka, and from long practice in it, and from the propinquity with which the dance requires, can name to their confreres the women whose hair is kept crêpe by bandoline, and with whom it continues so naturally, and can tell whose figure owes its undulating outline to nature, and who is indebted for it to the stay maker. 

Doubtless, this all arises from the present position of the bar and of the country.  Family, or party, or clever time serving meanness, or political scoundrelism, secures so much and so quickly, whilst merit, excepting after years of toil, commands so little in the legal profession in Ireland, that young men cannot be much condemned if they enjoy the six years probation which must elapse before the assistant barristership can be claimed. 

But the older members of the bar have also fallen off from the spirit of the nobler age; there is nothing more amusing than to watch the seniors in the hall when a change of ministry is reported.  The hurry, the anxiety, the distraction, the whispering in quite passages, the confabulations in retired corners, are all the very perfection of the light comedy of real life, and remind one most vividly of the Beggars’ Opera and of the famous scene between Peachum and Lockit.  We do not refer to these instances of anxiety for self-advancement as crimes – to expect that men will not look for place, and desire all the position and patronage which place can give in this country is a simple absurdity.  Office in the legal profession in Ireland is, but too often, the reward or price agreed on for services performed...

But deep as this degradation might be… even at this day there are men who, worthily represent the brave, proud, old days of Ireland, in which the gown of the lawyer was as honourable as the ribbon of a peer, and when the profession of the Irish barrister was as the Chancellor D’Agesseau wrote of that of the French advocate – ‘Nobility without title, rank with birth and riches without an estate.’”

The full article – which includes a list of the barristers whom the author wishes to except from this indictment – can be read here.