WILLIAM MUSGROVE, Esq., second puisne judge at the Cape, has succeeded William Menzies, Esq., first puisne judge deceased, and Sidney Bell, Esq., equity draughtsman, is, it is said, to succeed Mr. Musgrove.

AN ADDRESS has been sent by the Bar to Her Majesty, expressing the indignation and surprise it feels at the Papal Aggression, and an expression of its illegality and encroachment on the Queen's prerogative. Nothing could be more absurd than to assert "surprise" about a thing anticipated by every one as the natural result of the invitations to Rome by traitors in our own Church. It prevented many barristers, ourselves among the number, from signing the Memorial at all. It has appended to it the names of 747 gentlemen, consisting of 46 Queen's Counsel, 3 Masters in Chancery, 9 Serjeants-at-Law, and 689 outer barristers. A perusal of the names of those of the higher ranks of the profession will show that the feeling of deep offence at, and resolute determination to oppose, the Papa! assumption, is confined to no political party. They are as follows:

QUEEN'S COUNSEL.-William Baker, William Selwyn, Sir F. Thesiger, M.P., Richard B. Crowder, Francis Whitmarsh, Christopher Temple, John Stuart, M.P., Clement T. Swanston, Robert P. Roupell, Sir John Romilly, M.P., George Chilton, W. H. Watson, K. Macauley, C. Knowles, L. C. Humfrey, John Greenwood, C. Hoggins, Richard Bethell, Sir J. A. F. Simkinson, J. G. Teed, Loftus Wigram, M. P., James Russell, Kenyon S. Parker, James Parker, John Rolt, Frederick Calvert, W. P. Wood, M.P., Richard Malins, C. H. Whitehurst, P. F. O'Malley, W. Whateley, Charles S. Greaves, James Bacon, Spencer H. Walpole, M.P., A. Hayward, George J. Turner, M.P., Edward J. Lloyd, John Herbert Koe, H. L. Shepherd, W. Loftus Lowndes, John Walker, Wilkinson Mathews, W. C. Rowe, Henry Keating, B. Peacock, George Butt. MASTERS IN CHANCERY.-Sir W. Horne, Richard T. Kindersley, Richard Richards.

SERJEANTS-AT-LAW.-Alfred Dowling, Arnold Wallinger, R. C. Jones, N. R. Clarke, H. A. Merewether, H. Storks, J. B. Byles, W. F. Channell, E. S. Bain.

NEW Orders were issued by the Court of Chancery on the 2nd November last, under the recent Acts, which we print elsewhere.

In twenty years hence it is to be hoped that such pitiable buffoonery as the following will have become matter of curious history-a sort of fossil relic of barbarism. Mr. Baron Martin is the victim. "Just before the rising of the Court on Thursday, the judges withdrew into their private room, where Mr. Martin, the newlyappointed judge, was invested with a coif. Immediately afterwards their lordships resumed their seats in court, and Mr. Serjeant Martin entered, and took his seat on the front bench, amongst the serjeants, and was then called upon to 66 count," according to ancient custom.

This ceremony, which is now much divested of its ancient solemnities, consisted simply (!) of the newly-made serjeant's reading a 'count' in an action of dower, as follows:- Yorkshire to wit.-Ann Ring, widow, who was the wife of William Ring, Esq., by John Jones, her attorney, demands against Charles Davis the third part of ten messuages, ten barns, &c., in the parish of Ripon, in the county of York, as the dower of the said Ann Ring, of the endowment of William Ring, deceased, heretofore her husband, of which she has nothing, &c.' The senior serjeant in court, Mr. Serjeant Channell, then demanded that the writ of dower should be read, which was done by the officer of the court. Mr. Serjeant Byles, the next serjeant in point of seniority in court, then said, 'I imparle.' The Chief Justice said, 'Be it so.' His lordship then said, 'Brother Martin, will you move?' and upon Mr. Serjeant Martin bowing in the negative, the ceremony closed, and the court adjourned."

CALLS TO THE BAR :

MIDDLE TEMPLE, November 9th.-William Caldwell Roscoe, John Hargrave Hodgson, George Edward Frere, Henry Lushington Phillips, and William Parker, Esquires.

MIDDLE TEMPLE, November 30th.-George Frederick Bullock, Alexander John Mansfield, Nathaniel Lindley, Thomas Turner, John Alexander Jackson, Wriothesley Baptist Noel, John Carter, Edwin John Herapath, William Sefton Moorhouse, John Doherty, and Horace M. Wright, Esquires; James B. Davidson, M.A; Edward A. Carlyon, M.A.; and William U. Heygate, M.Á.

LINCOLN'S Inn.-Henry A. Roberts, John D. Rochfort, Esquires; Francis Compton, D.C.L.; William S. Pakenham, M.A.; Edward P. Walstenholme, M.A.; Francis Dobinson, M.A.; and Samuel Brandram, M.A.

GRAY'S INN, November 20th.-Montague Mordaunt Ainslie, Esq. (of Christ Church College, Oxford, B.A.), and William Arnold Bainbrigge, Esq., were called to the degree of barrister at-law. January 22nd.-Richard Martin, Esq., B.A.

THE HON. DAVID PLUNKETT has resigned the office of Master of the Court of Common Pleas, in consequence of serious ill-health. Mr. Plunkett had been prothonotary of that court when Lord Plunkett was chief justice, previous to his promotion to the seals.

LEGAL PROMOTIONS.-Mr. Serjeant Allen of the Oxford Circuit, and Mr. Serjeant Wilkins of the Northern Circuit, have received patents of precedence. Mr. Miller, of the Midland Circuit, will receive the coif. The vacancies occasioned by the elevation of Mr. Martin, and the retirement from circuit practice of Mr. Whitehurst, have led to several applications to the Lord Chancellor for silk, but at present no determination has been made as to which, if any, gentlemen will be called within the Bar.

THE NEW MASTERSHIP IN CHANCERY.-Master Dowdeswell, senior master, resigned the office of head master, which he held for thirty years.

VOL. XIV. NO. XXVI.

K

HENRY JOHN HODGSON, Esq., has been appointed Recorder of Ludlow, in the room of John Buckle, Esq., Recorder of Worcester, resigned.

It is our melancholy duty to record the demise of GEORGE SPENCE, Esq., Q. C., which took place under very distressing circumstances, by his own hand, on the 12th of December last. The details of the occurrence are still fresh in the memory of our readers, having been eagerly detailed by the daily press at the time, with that weak desire to gratify a morbid curiosity which is one of the worst errors in taste of the present day.

The deceased had attained his sixty-fourth year (having been born in 1787), and was in the full vigour of his faculties, as his great work, by which his name will be favorably handed down to posterity, fully testifies. Mr. Spence was a pupil in the chambers of the celebrated Mr. Bell, and was called to the Bar by the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple in 1811. He very early acquired an extensive and lucrative practice, and in 1827 entered parliament, succeeding, in the representation of Ripon, Sir Lancelot Shadwell (then Mr. Shadwell, the late lamented Vice-Chancellor); the vacancy being occasioned by the appointment of the latter to be Vice-Chancellor of England, in lieu of Sir Anthony Hart, appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland. This seat he retained until the parliament which was returned on the 29th of January, 1833, when both Mr. Spence, and his colleague, Mr. Pettit, lost their seats: he never sought another.

It is said that the House of Lords is the grave of the members of the House of Commons. It very often happens that barristers of large practice without the bar at once cease to command an active business on being called within it. This was eminently the case with Mr. Spence. While without the bar, he had the reputation of one of the largest, if not the largest business of all his compeers. But although he had a fair share of leading business in equity for some time after he had been raised to the dignity of a Queen's Counsel (in the Michaelmas Vacation, 1835), he did not as a leader retain the confidence of the solicitors in these courts. Thus deprived of the accustomed objects in the Senate and the Courts of Equity on which to exercise his activity and industry, he turned his attention to legal literature. He was chosen the first lecturer of Lincoln's Inn when an effort was made by the Inns of Court, a few years ago, to establish a regular course of Professional Studies and Examination among candidates for the Bar. The attempt, however, did not succeed, and the lectures were discontinued. At last, after years of patient and indefatigable labour, he gave to the world in 1846 the first volume of his "Chancery Jurisdiction," a work which immediately attracted the attention of jurists, not in England alone, but throughout Europe, displaying as it did a most intimate acquaintance with the antiquities of English and Roman legal literature, and of the influences their

1 For a detailed review of this first vol. see Law Mag., Vol. VIII. (N. S.) p.

distant streams produce on our modern jurisprudence: qualities which had indeed been indicated by an early work on the same subject, published in 1826, but which the labours and research of twenty years in the study and at the bar had matured and augmented. The second part of this great work, containing the modern practice of the Court of Chancery, was published in the close of the year 1849.1 Although mention was there made of an intended third volume, yet the work was, in a great measure, complete: and the revulsion of the nervous system, after it had been wound up to undergo, for a series of years, the labour of unceasing attention to minute details, and bringing references from a vast variety of authorities to bear upon one point, proved so oppressing to the spirits as to lead to the melancholy result we have already recorded. It will be remembered that a similar catastrophe, no doubt referable to the same causes, overtook the late Colonel Gurwood within about the same period after he had completed his great work, the "Wellington Despatches."

As a legislator, Mr. Spence distinguished himself by the attention which he bestowed to the subject of legal reform. In 1829-30 he resisted the then proposed appointment of a fourth judge in equity, from a conviction that such a measure would only augment the evils it was intended to remedy. But he was always a zealous reformer of the abuses in these courts: and in 1839 he published a pamphlet, in which he advocated the plan of Lord Langdale for a re-constitution of the Court of Chancery (ante, Art. III.) As a writer and speaker his style was plain, and unornamented by any figures of speech: sensible, clear and practical: and he had the art, or natural gift, of speaking upon abstruse and learned topics without using either abstruse or learned words.

1 This volume is reviewed, Law Mag, Vol. XXII. (N. S. p. 60.)

Correspondence.

MR. BARBER'S CASE.

[It is our practice to disregard all attacks, either on ourselves or the articles of our contributors, first, because we feel that we and they can well afford to do so, and, secondly, because the public have little or no interest in such controversies.

We therefore give insertion to the following exclusively because Mr. Barber's cause might possibly suffer by its non-insertion.— EDITOR.]

We find that with reference to our article in the last number of the Magazine, on the case of Mr. W. H. Barber, a writer in the Legal Observer-apparently somewhat of a freshman in the arts of advocacy-has accused us of gross misrepresentation of evidence, and of an unfounded attack on the judges of the Court of Queen's Bench. Many of our readers may perhaps recognize in this notice of the Legal Observer an awkward attempt to shift public attention from essentials to non-essentials; and to further prejudice Mr. Barber's case in the minds of the judges by the shuffling suggestion that their lordships have been rudely and unjustifiably assailed in our pages. As silence under such a charge would be fair evidence against us, we here emphatically deny it, not from deference to the Legal Observer, but from respect to their lordships. In a subsequent number of the Legal Observer, of date December 21st, 1850, the same writer, whilst endeavouring to justify his exclusion of a letter from Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Barber's attorney, charging the Legal Observer with garbling (a letter since published in pamphlet shape), returns to the charge against ourselves in these terms:- "The illtimed zeal which dictated the publication of the article in the pages of our quarterly contemporary, seemed to require that the attack it contained on the judges of the Court of Queen's Bench and the Incorporated Law Society (how we apples swim!') should be promptly answered." We do not think so. We cannot think our ill-timed zeal,-if ill-timed it were,-seemed to require that the Legal Observer volunteer should rush into the lists to break a lance with us in defence of the court. Our respect for their lordships of the Queen's Bench rests upon too deep and broad a foundation to allow us to think that they can ever stand in need of such advocacy.

But with the Legal Observer advocate of the Incorporated Law Society we must (notwithstanding we may expose ourselves to the charge of breaking a fly upon a wheel) be a little more particular. The circumstances upon which we are accused of misrepresenting evidence are these. The pardon of Mr. Barber issued on (amongst